Niklas Halusa, Co-Founder and President of Nautical Commerce, sat down with our CEO Josh for a chat on how the company raised a $30 million Series A with the help of Mighty Digits’ full service support.
Nautical is a multi-vendor marketplace platform for brands, retailers, B2B companies, and startups to launch and scale an online marketplace. Its goal is to empower businesses to build thriving marketplaces by making marketplace technology accessible.
Mighty Digits has helped startups build financial models and pitch decks to secure nearly $300 million in funding, and has managed the startups’ accounting so the founders could focus on scaling the company.
As Niklas describes, when you’re starting a company, there are many accounting tasks that compound, such as:
Basics, like setting up a bank account, credit card, and payment processor
Then as you start to transact, you have to think about AP and invoicing
As you get busier, you have to hire employees and setup payroll
Then as you start to grow, you have to think about a financial plan and getting financing
While Niklas has a background in accounting, he soon realized that there were quite a few headaches in keeping track of everything, and he wasn’t getting much out of it besides basic tracking and reporting. Even more importantly, he realized that doing all the tasks were a huge distraction from the business, and that his time was much too valuable to be spending it reconciling the books.
" A business doesn't win because of the accounting...but for sure it can lose when that person spends their entire time trying to reconcile "
He realized that he should be focused on:
Mighty Digits came in and made an immediate impact, helping Nautical Commerce with:
Building and managing a tech stack for all of the accounting procedures.
Niklas wanted to "work with a business that can help me come up with a solution that takes work off my plate"
Creating a financial model and investor materials to assist the fundraise.
"It's one thing to be able to keep track of what you're doing and a very different thing to actually plan out and build a model"
Partnering with Niklas to provide advice on accounting processes, model building, and fundraising
"Our Series A couldn't have happened with the timeline or size without Mighty Digits' support"
With the help of Mighty Digits, Nautical Commerce closed their $30 million Series A in June 2022.
Mighty Digits has loved being a partner to Nautical Commerce, and is sure there is even more success in their future!
Before signing off, we asked Niklas for advice to other founders:
" If starting a business, you should NOT be doing your own accounting "
" Do not think you need to own all of the financial modeling"
" Do not dig yourself into a hole thinking you're saving money by doing all of the small tasks by yourself "
" Your job is to think of the major levers of the business and work in extremely broad stroke priorities "
We couldn’t have said it any better ourselves!