Announcing Our $3M Seed Round: What’s Next for PayShepherd?
New funding supports the modernization of contractor billing for heavy industry and manufacturing facilities
Today, we’re excited to announce our US$3M seed round, supporting our growth as the next-generation cost management technology platform for heavy industry and manufacturing facilities around the world. This round is led by Nashville Capital Network, with participation from existing investors Thin Air Labs and the Accelerate Fund, managed by Yaletown Partners with support from the A100.
Since PayShepherd was launched in 2018, we’ve helped manufacturing facilities and contractors eliminate overspending, benchmarked in excess of US $1M yearly per major facility, and enabled better negotiations to improve relationships between management and vendors. The facility-contractor ecosystem is the foundation of a US $1.8T manufacturing industry in the U.S., and US $148B in Canada, that mostly relies on spreadsheets and complex legacy systems. We aim to change this model by overhauling and digitizing these business processes to eliminate overspend and increase transparency in transactions.
“PayShepherd’s deep domain knowledge drew us to first invest in their business and that familiarity has proven a growth advantage. PayShepherd exceeded their sales targets this year, and is breaking through with large enterprise clients, and rapidly identifying new industrial markets that would value their product capabilities.”
— Yasmine Al-Hussein, Investment Analyst for Accelerate Fund III
Our previous CAD $700K pre-seed round supported growth in North America and the achievement of our SOC 2 compliance, a major step in ensuring our customers have the proper governance, controls, procedures, and safeguards in place to protect their data.
Investing into the future of contractor billing
“Success in heavy industry comes from nurturing and protecting the relationships between facility and contractor. This investment reaffirms our approach in combining the data our customers already have with a highly-focused product that identifies contract and invoice discrepancies, eliminates errors, and empowers the fair exchange of value between facility and contractor.”
— Wesley Sessenwein, CEO, PayShepherd
This new seed round will go towards expanding our product and engineering capabilities, strengthening operations in North America, and developing new ecosystem integrations to better serve our customers. As trust in relationships and transparency in data are core principles for manufacturers around the world, we plan to move into new verticals and increase our investments into new geographies. Our upcoming product roadmap will fuel these initiatives through the continuous evolution of our core platform and many new features designed to address the most pressing facility-contractor issues.
Where PayShepherd came from
With over 35 years of combined experience in manufacturing facilities, our three co-founders knew the answer to the contracted services challenge. Wesley Sessenwein, CEO, and Jennifer Hunter, COO, saw firsthand how assumptions and mistakes between service providers and facilities management teams led to relationship frustrations, financial loss, and reputational damage. Often due to unintentional errors or a lack of resources to sift through the thousands of invoice line items, contract pages, and union agreements, the duo brought on Johan Lee, CTO, to bring a modern, data-driven technology solution to the problem.
Today, manufacturing facilities and the contractors they work with, face even more pressures as input and raw material prices skyrocket with inflation, constrictions in supply chains squeeze profit margins and force cost cutting, and labour market shortages cause issues for contractors as they try to staff facilities from smaller labour pools. As a “blue collar-friendly, white collar-savvy” company, we’ve been in our customers’ shoes and everything we do, from the PayShepherd platform to customer support, is designed around this ‘do more with less’ outlook within the industry.
We’re here to strengthen the culture and relationships between facilities and service providers using data-driven insights and this seed round only reaffirms our approach.