Xero is a cloud-based accounting software company founded in Wellington, New Zealand in 2006. It serves more than 4.4 million subscribers - mostly small businesses and the accountants and bookkeepers who advise them - across New Zealand, Australia, the UK, the US and beyond. Xero connects bank feeds, invoicing, payroll, expense tracking and a marketplace of thousands of third-party apps into a single real-time platform, and reported NZ$2.1 billion in revenue in FY25.
Pilot is a San Francisco-based finance back-office for startups and small businesses, combining software with U.S.-based accountants to deliver bookkeeping, tax prep, and CFO services. Founded in 2017 by three MIT friends who had sold two prior startups together, it now serves thousands of venture-backed companies and is backed by Sequoia, Index, and Jeff Bezos.
Every is an all-in-one back-office platform for startup founders, bundling free incorporation, business banking, corporate cards, treasury, payroll, HR, benefits, bookkeeping, and taxes into a single dashboard. Founded in 2021 by Rajeev Behera and Barry Peterson and headquartered in San Francisco, the company raised a $22.5M Series A led by Redpoint Ventures in September 2024 to keep replacing the patchwork of tools that consume founders' time.
Jean-Denis Greze is the Co-Founder and CEO of Town, an AI-powered tax platform for small businesses that raised an $18M seed round led by First Round Capital in March 2025. Previously, he served as CTO of Plaid, where he scaled the engineering team from 20 to 350 people, and before that as Director of Engineering at Dropbox. A Columbia CS grad and Harvard Law JD, he brings an unusually cross-disciplinary approach to building technology companies at the intersection of finance, law, and software.
Vanessa Kruze is the founder and CEO of Kruze Consulting, a San Francisco-based accounting and finance firm exclusively serving venture-capital-backed startups. A CPA and Deloitte Tax alum, she launched Kruze in 2012 after working as a startup controller and spotting a gap in the market for specialized, tech-forward financial services for founders. Today, the firm has served 800+ startups that have collectively raised over $15 billion in VC funding, earned seven consecutive Inc 5000 honors, and is known in Silicon Valley as the go-to accounting partner for early- and growth-stage companies.
Jordan Lewis is the General Counsel of Redbud VC and Vice President & General Counsel of The Premiere Group, both based in Columbia, Missouri. A dual-licensed attorney (Missouri and Illinois) with a decade-plus of experience, he bridges the worlds of law, tax, and venture capital - handling M&A, fund structuring, governance, and legal strategy for a pre-seed VC firm that bets on founders shaped by struggle. Before Redbud, he cut his teeth as a litigator at Carmody MacDonald in St. Louis and has been a published voice in Missouri In-House Counsel on biometric privacy and employment law.