Five milestone moments from our first five years

We’ve been quietly celebrating our fifth birthday for a couple of months now. First we had cupcakes. Then we moved into a brand new office. Then we launched a huge number of product improvements for our customers.

Hey, that’s just how we roll.

What we missed was a retrospective on the road we’ve travelled. Here are some milestone moments from our adventures:

November 16, 2010

Customer number 1. We were newborns in the startup world, and on our very first day 81 people decided to give us a try. I’ll be profiling some of these longstanding Wave customers in the coming weeks, but in the meantime: Marilyn, Tim, David, Bev, Kevin and the 76 others, thanks for putting your trust in Wave for the last 5 years!

May 11, 2011

Just about every startup has to raise funds from investors, and Wave was no exception. About six months after we launched, we announced the close of our “Seed” financing round. We’ve done bigger investment rounds since, and we have a truly great roster of VC talent on our board, supporting our success. But this first round, led by OMERS Ventures, was a huge vote of confidence, demonstrating that a bunch of really smart people shared our vision for what was possible with Wave. We’ve done three more financing rounds since then, with OMERS Ventures participating in each of them.

December 16, 2012

Launching credit card processing added an entirely new level of complexity and infrastructure to Wave’s already complex suite of accounting, invoicing, payroll and receipt scanning. The team worked incredibly hard to get it right, and on this day we launched Payments by Wave, making it possible for you to accept Visa, MasterCard, American Express and more on the invoices you sent. It’s become one of our most popular products.

July 30, 2014

We’re not going to pick a favorite customer of all time. (You’re all special!) But on this day, 1,383 days after we first stepped into the world, Wave signed up its 1 millionth customer. Gotta say, that felt amazing. We now sign up more than 50,000 small business customers every month, so we have customer #2,000,000 in sight.That will be another cake-worthy celebration.

November 16, 2015

Not only did we celebrate our 5th birthday on this day, but our CEO and co-founder Kirk made a bold announcement: The coming year would be one of huge leaps forward. With five years of experience under our belts, and a recently closed round of financing ($17.2 million) in our pockets, we embarked on what we’re calling “Next Wave.” We’re launching some of our best, smartest features ever — in fact, we’ve already launched many of them. Our goal: Making the traditional tasks of accounting, invoicing and running your small business, a seamless, effortless, intuitive part of your business day.

Today, the Wave team is 90 people strong, and composed of the smartest, most dedicated people we can imagine having the pleasure of working (and playing) with. That’s another thing we celebrate. Cheers! Happy (belated) birthday to us!