Buhrdorf intended to take a year off, but “didn’t quite make it a year” he told me.
ZenBusiness is the brainchild of Ross Buhrdorf, who joined vacation rental marketplace HomeAway five months after its inception as founding CTO, and stayed for a decade until its acquisition by Expedia in 2015 for $3.9 billion. When I last chatted with CEO Russ Buhrdorf, he described rolling up this market as one of the key initial targets for the company: Under state incorporation laws, companies must designate a so-called “registered agent” to receive official notices from regulatory agencies, and so ZenBusiness chose this strategic point for entry into the market. The company launched with a product that was essentially an automated registered agent for new entrepreneurs. ZenBusiness raises $4.5m to help launch one million small businesses by 2023
Zen business series#
Today, it’s announcing that it has raised a new $15 million series A round led by return backer Greycroft, along with returning investors Lerer Hippeau and Revolution’s Rise of the Rest fund, alongside new investors Rosecliff Venture Partners, Interlock Partners and Recruit Strategic Partners. When I last chatted with the company 18 months ago, they had just raised a $4.5 million seed round and had launched its platform. The Austin-based startup wants to empower entrepreneurs to build businesses large and small by dramatically simplifying the processes required to launch a business and then grow it. It can be inordinately complicated (and expensive!) to ensure that your business is ready and legal. That includes such delightful topics as choosing a particular model for incorporation, ensuring that a business has the right licenses to operate, and tracking all the legal changes happening in 50 state legislatures every year.
But on the other side, they have to deal with the regulatory state and all the minutia that comes with running any business in the 21st century. On one side, entrepreneurs need creativity, imagination - a dream, essentially - to find, build, and market a new product to users and consumers. There are two sides to starting a new business.
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