{"id":44404,"date":"2023-10-20T15:35:44","date_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:35:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/startupsmart.test\/2023\/10\/20\/shoeboxed-australia-splits-from-us-parent-on-the-way-to-closing-a-seed-funding-round-startupsmart\/"},"modified":"2023-10-20T15:35:44","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:35:44","slug":"shoeboxed-australia-splits-from-us-parent-on-the-way-to-closing-a-seed-funding-round-startupsmart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/uncategorized\/shoeboxed-australia-splits-from-us-parent-on-the-way-to-closing-a-seed-funding-round-startupsmart\/","title":{"rendered":"Shoeboxed Australia splits from US parent, on the way to closing a seed funding round – StartupSmart"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Shoeboxed Australia, a startup that digitises and organises receipts for tax purposes, is 75% of the way through closing a seed funding round after splitting from its American parent company.<\/p>\n

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The startup organises its users\u2019 receipts, invoices and documents for tax purposes and stores the data securely online. Documents can be submitted in a number of ways via scanning through the startup\u2019s smartphone app, email, fax or even good old fashioned snail mail. The data is then extracted, verified and organised by its data entry team manually.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It officially launched in Australia in July 2010, thanks to a licensing agreement with Shoeboxed, setting up a sales team and data entry team in Australia, while all development was handled by its US counterpart.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Shoeboxed Australia founder and chief executive officer Simon Foster says the split made sense for both companies given the differences in the way tax is handled in Australia and the United States.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve been growing terrifically over the last five years, but it became more and more obvious that the US and Australian markets in small business tax compliance are very, very different,\u201d Foster says.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cFor example, in the US a micro business files taxes once a year and they\u2019ve got this crazy system where the whole country basically files their taxes on the same day. So essentially they only need to log in once a year.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cIn Australia, we have a lot more complexity around what\u2019s deductable and what\u2019s not. So an Australian customer logs in considerably more frequently.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Shoeboxed Australia founder and chief executive officer Simon Foster<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

That disconnect led to differing priorities when it came to developing the product. As a consequence the decision was made to separate the two businesses. The resulting split places Shoeboxed Australia in an interesting position \u2013 a five-year-old startup that\u2019s profitable but has no development team. So they turned to BlueChilli, which has been handling development while the startup raises funding and builds its own dev team.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cGoing with BlueChilli enabled us to scale our product and build features really quickly. It\u2019s a little bit unusual because we\u2019re not a seed stage idea, but we haven\u2019t had our own core developers,\u201d Foster says.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re raising a capital round at the moment, that\u2019s 75% complete. The valuation is similar to what you would see out of a seed round. Similar to someone coming out of an incubator or accelerator program,\u201d Foster says.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cSo it\u2019s a bit of a different thing for investors to get their heads around.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The startup will continue to have a relationship with Shoeboxed, with which it has a number of intellectual property and share option arrangements that can\u2019t be disclosed.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll continue to work together, it\u2019s all very amicable,\u201d Foster says.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cThe nature of the IP relationship is that it makes sense to continue to happen. We believe tax compliance is a very geographic specific thing and by focusing on the Australia and New Zealand market we can provide value that a global player can\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Raising your<\/i> first round of capital<\/i><\/a>? Starting a<\/i> crowdfunding campaign<\/i><\/a>? Want to grow your business<\/i> with Instagram?<\/i><\/a> StartupSmart School can help.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shoeboxed Australia, a startup that digitises and organises receipts for tax purposes, is 75% of the way through closing a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":59263,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,8,23,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44404"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44404"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44404\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}