Founding Botkeeper
The inside joke around the Botkeeper office is that founder Enrico Palmerino hates bookkeeping and accounting, which is ironic, but the way he came up with the concept of Botkeeper had a lot to do with his first startup, a lighting business that automated how you analyze, design, and manufacture LEDs. This business that had gotten started in his dorm room had climbed to around $8.5 million in recurring revenue by the time he graduated, had 60 employees, and was number 46 on the INC 500 list.
And then they ran out of cash because the books were always behind. The lighting business had very complicated accounting, deferred revenue recognition, depreciation schedules on assets, foreign currency conversion, inventory, manufacturing — you name it. And because the team didn't know what their cash position was, they over-leveraged themselves.
Ultimately, bookkeeping (or the lack of speed or the ability to keep up) almost sank the business altogether. It was apparent that this was happening to a lot of businesses—their bookkeeping and accounting was letting them down with slow or delayed reporting, limited analytics, and issues with accuracy that cause awesome businesses to fall victim to cash flow challenges, slipping margins, or slowed revenue growth. Enter the genesis of Botkeeper.
The idea was to build a cyborg. Rather than hiring and managing a team of in-house accountants and bookkeepers or managing an overseas accounting firm that suffers from the limitations of low-cost manual data entry, you could instead human-assisted AI to do a lot of the work and automate data entry and accounting processes. The result was the industry's most efficient bookkeeper - better, faster, smarter and this benefited the companies that use botkeeeper by providing them with the fastest, most accurate financials they could get a hold of. It's near-real-time at their fingertips, and it's half the cost of hiring a bookkeeper or outsourced firm.
Botkeeper was founded by a team of entrepreneurs who suffered the same bookkeeping challenges experienced by most small and midsize businesses and realized the primary issue with bookkeeping was the humans in the middle tasked with doing the work. Bookkeeping is a tedious, manual, and repetitive data entry combined with visualization and analytics of that data. Human error, unexpected life events, a need to sleep, and a lack of scalability make humans very inefficient at bookkeeping. However, if we could replace the human with robot-like software, we might be able to solve this dilemma. Software bots are excellent at automating data entry accurately, 24/7. Software bots are also great at following rules and accounting policies consistently and precisely, as well as visually rendering unlimited beautiful reports, dashboards, and charts.
We are proud to bring you the world’s best robot bookkeeper, or as we like to call it, Botkeeper–a faster, more accurate, more affordable, and highly scalable bookkeeper that represents the future of bookkeeping as we know it.
Enrico Palmerino launched his first startup, ThinkLite, from his dorm room, and he grew the company to $8.5M ARR before he graduated. He then invested in SmartBooks, joining as their Managing Director, and helped grow the 
