Ignition

Every service business shares a quiet indignity: the work is done, the client is happy, and the money still hasn't arrived. In 2009, a Sydney accountant named Guy Pearson kept running into that gap. He watched e-commerce companies take payment the instant a customer clicked “buy,” then looked at his own practice - proposals typed in Word, invoices chased by email, cash arriving whenever it felt like it. The contrast bothered him enough to build the alternative.

That alternative soft-launched at Xerocon in 2012 as Practice Ignition, and became a company in 2013 when Pearson and product designer Dane Thomas formally founded it. The premise was narrow but sharp: make the engagement letter - the document that defines the work and its price - the same moment the client signs and agrees to pay. Do that, and everything downstream (the invoice, the reminder, the reconciliation) can run on its own.

The wedge worked. In 2014 the company added integrated payments, so firms could collect fees directly off an accepted proposal. Recurring billing followed. By the time it dropped “Practice” from its name in 2021 and raised a $50 million Series C, Ignition had stopped being a proposal tool and become something closer to a revenue operating system for professional services.

The scale of what flows through it is the tell. Ignition customers processed roughly $3.1 billion through the platform in 2025, up from about $3 billion the year before. Over its first decade the company handled more than $2.7 billion in client payments and 2.3 million accepted proposals. Those are not vanity numbers - they are the sum of thousands of small firms deciding to route their money through one place.

What Ignition sells, ultimately, isn't software. It's the removal of an awkward conversation - the one about money - from the relationship between a firm and its client. Price it once, sign it once, and let the system do the asking.