South African fintech startup Drive Revenue, which has developed a cloud-enabled financial management system, has closed its first external funding round, underpinned by overseas investors.
Launched in July 2013 and a graduate from Microsoft’s Bizspark programme, Drive Revenue offers a cloud-enabled financial management system which is specifically geared towards legal practices.
The web and mobile platform allows for an integrated and coherent system for recording time and activities, issues invoices based on inputs, produces financial accounts for the practice, and enables real time analysis of practice performance metrics.
Drive Revenue has now secured its first funding round, which will be used to further develop system features for the modern legal practice and to actively market the product to the local market.
“Since going to market, the demand for our solutions has ratified our commitment to providing solutions that are scalable, secure and hassle-free. Cloud technology has brought the best in infrastructure facilitation, from server availability and computing power, security, disk space, backup and disaster recovery to every device on the planet at a fraction of the cost, completely minimising the risk of running your own infrastructure in-house,” said Jenny Assheton-Smith, chief executive officer (CEO) of Drive Revenue.
“We built our applications using the very latest in cloud application development technology, and provide our enterprise grade solutions affordably and cost effectively to the smallest through to the largest law firms in the world, and our clients love that our applications are simple and easy to use, whilst still delivering complex functionality.”
The investment was obtained with the assistance of investment and advisory firm HAVAÍC, which specialises in early-stage, high-growth African businesses with proven concepts and global prospects, and offers investment opportunities to sophisticated investors and international venture capital companies with an interest in Africa.
“When I first met Jenny and her team in late 2016 and saw a demo of the product offering, I immediately recognised the usefulness and simplicity of this product for the legal practitioner compared to the existing expensive legacy systems. We are excited to see the rapid uptake of this great product,” said Grant Rock, executive director of HAVAÍC.
