Peloton cofounder, Graham Stanton, is shifting his focus from fitness nuts to financial wonks.
Today Stanton and cofounder Edgar Thomas revealed their new accounting and bookkeeping company, Avise. Aimed at CFOs of fast-growing companies, the pair are out to disrupt the sleepy world of financial software using the same kind of slick, user-friendly design that helped Peloton revolutionize the exercise industry.
“When we started Peloton in 2012, no self-respecting tech company would touch fitness equipment. It was a dopy category that hadn’t seen much innovation since the 1980s,” says Graham, who initially ran finance and marketing for Peloton and later built its business intelligence unit. “The same is true for accounting software. Many features haven’t changed since the 1980s. Innovators aren’t touching it, and it’s wrongly seen as a boring, solved problem.”
The pair thinks existing accounting software is lousy, outdated, and ignores fast growing startups and mid-sized companies. On one end, there are basic bookkeeping programs like QuickBooks designed for small businesses. On the other—complex ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems from software giants like SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft can cost millions of dollars and require an army of consultants and technicians to run.
Stanton and Thomas designed Avise to fill the gap in the middle. They’re want to give startups the same tools used by S&P 500 companies, but without the high cost and high maintenance. With dynamic design, cloud computing, a collaborative interface, and live data, Avise can serve as a robust accounting ledger and deliver real-time analytics on the financial health of a business. The founders say the software can quickly integrate with existing databases like Quickbooks and provide a live accounting dashboard to help drive strategy and decisions. “I’ve had a career-long frustration with back-office software,’ says Stanton. “In the early days, it really matters. It’s hard to get insight into the business and know what you need to do to check all the right boxes for accounting and compliance. There’s a gap in the market that became an obsession in the back of my mind.”
In stealth until today, Avise closed a $5.5 million seed round in August 2020 led by FinTech Collective plus capital from Raga Partners, GGV, and Stanton’s Peloton cofounders.
Stanton, who serves as Avise’s CEO, is bringing tricks learned at Peloton to spice up the CFO software world. “User experience has to come first. Before Peloton, fitness equipment was a series of blinking lights. No one cared about user experience. It was sad. The same is true for financial software today. We’re building this for the accountants using the product.”
Thomas, a professional accountant and Avise’s COO, knows the pain firsthand. “For years, I had been giving software company’s feedback on ways to improve the products, and no one listened… With Graham’s insight into cutting-edge consumer tech, we can build something better than what’s currently out there.”
To help build a consumer friendly, design-based product, Stanton and Thomas recruited Peloton’s original UX creator, Eric Hwang (who also created Peloton’s famous “P” logo).
Stanton and Thomas decided to leave their jobs launch Avise during a vacation in Iceland in 2019. The pair, who graduated from Harvard in 2005, met at freshman orientation and were roommates from sophomore through senior year.
After graduation, Stanton joined billionaire Barry Diller’s internet holding company IAC, first as an engineer at Pronto.com and later ran the shopping referral site Gifts.com. Thomas, who grew up in Sierra Leone, became an accountant. His first gig was at Deloitte, and he later returned to Sierra Leone during the 2015 Ebola outbreak to run finance for Partners In Health. There he oversaw more than $35 million in international aid to treat victims and contain the pandemic. “It was a crazy experience. Sierra Leone was largely a cash economy, and I remember going to the Central Bank to withdraw 500 million Leones, and they didn’t have cash on hand to give us the money we needed.”
Stanton had scored a multi-million windfall after Peloton’s 2019 IPO and was looking to start a new company. “I guess I must be addicted to the struggle.” He and Thomas had talked about a launching a software startup for years, and on a drive through the Icelandic wilderness, Stanton convinced Thomas, then accounting director at Boston’s Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, to launch Avise with him.
Stanton and Thomas raised the seed round in August 2020 in the middle of the Covid pandemic and have spent the lockdown building a prototype. Avise has 11 employees and is launching a private Alpha test version to share with their network of startup founders. The Beta is coming in the fall.
While Peloton has jumped from fitness equipment to a tight-knit community with four million paying members and a growing clothing business, Stanton is tight-lipped about Avise’s merch strategy. “We have a few face masks lying around, but yeah, we’ll need to up our game.”
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