GoSite raises $ 40 million to help small businesses bring their businesses online – Heaven32

There are 12 million small and medium-sized businesses in the United States, but they have remained one of the most underserved segments of the B2B universe – this volume highlights a great deal of fragmentation, and with other issues like constraints budget, there are a number of barriers. to build for them to scale. Today, however, a start-up that helps SMEs connect announces significant funding, a sign of how things are moving at a time when many companies have realized that being online is no longer an option. . but a necessity.

GoSite, a San Diego-based startup that helps small and medium-sized businesses build websites and, with minimal technical knowledge, perform other functions of their businesses online, such as payments, online marketing, appointment booking and accounting, improved funding by $ 40 million.

GoSite provides a one-stop-shop for users to create and manage everything online, with the possibility of supplying up to 80 different third-party services.

“We want to help our customers be everywhere,” said Alex Goode, Founder and CEO of GoSite. “We integrate with Facebook and other mainstream platforms such as Siri, Apple Maps, and search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing, among others.” It also creates some features like payments from scratch.

Series B comes after a good year for the company. Driven by the circumstances of Covid-19, businesses have increasingly turned to the internet to interact with their customers, and GoSite, which has “thousands” of SMB customers, said it doubled its customer base in 2020.

This latest round is led by Left Lane Capital of New York, with participation from Longley Capital, Cove Fund, Stage 2, Ankona Capital and Serra Ventures. GoSite is clearly surprising when the iron is hot: Longley, also based in San Diego, led the company’s previous round, which was August of this year. To date, he has raised $ 60 million.

GoSite is, in a sense, an offer for greater inclusion in technology: its customers are not companies that “beat” other vendors who offer website creation and hosting and other commonly used services. used by SMBs, like Squarespace and Wix or GoDaddy. or Shopify.

Rather, these are companies that may never have used any of these products: local garages, local landscapers, local hairdressers, local accounting firms, local dentists, etc. With the exception of the accounting firm, these are not businesses that will go fully online like a retailer would, especially given the physical nature of each of these professions. But they’ll need an online presence and the levers it gives them to communicate in order to survive, especially at a time when their old models are under pressure.

Goode started GoSite after graduating from college in Michigan with a computer science degree, growing up and working in small businesses; his parents, grandparents and others in his Michigan town had their own stores. (He moved to San Diego “because of the weather,” he joked.)

Their belief is that while there are and always will be alternatives like Facebook or Yelp to plant a flag, nothing can replace the long-term value, security and control of building something that is theirs. clean – a feeling that small business owners would surely grasp. .

This is perhaps the most interesting aspect of GoSite as it exists today: precisely no think of everything that already exists as “the competition”. Instead, Goode sees his goal as creating a dashboard that helps business owners manage it all, with up to 80 different services currently available, and more, from one place. and with a minimum of technical skills and time spent. to learn the tricks of the trade.

“There is definitely a huge demand for help from small businesses and something like GoSite can do it,” Goode said. “The space is very fragmented and noisy and they don’t even know where to start.”

This, combined with the growth and relevance of GoSite to today’s market, is part of what has attracted invest ors.

“The opportunity we’re betting on here is the all-in-one solution,” said Vinny Pujji, partner at Left Lane. “If you’re a carpet cleaner or a house painter, you don’t have the ability to understand or work with five or six different software. We spoke to thousands of SMEs when we analyzed this, and that’s what we heard. He said the other important thing is that GoSite has a customer service team and for the SMBs that use it, they like that when they call, “GoSite picks up the phone.”