Peloton co-founder launches software company to shake up new industry

Peloton co-founder Graham Stanton goes from fitness freaks to financial freaks.

Today, Stanton and his co-founder Edgar Thomas unveiled their new accounting and bookkeeping company, Avise. Aimed at CFOs of fast-growing companies, the duo seek to disrupt the sleepy world of financial software by using the same kind of sleek, user-friendly design that has helped Peloton revolutionize the exercise industry.

“When we launched Peloton in 2012, no self-respecting tech company wanted to touch fitness equipment. It was a silly category that hadn’t seen a lot of innovation since the 1980s, ”says Graham, who first led finance and marketing for Peloton and then built his business intelligence unit. “The same is true for accounting software. A lot of features haven’t changed since the 1980s. Innovators don’t touch them, and it’s mistakenly seen as a boring and solved problem.

The pair think existing accounting software is lousy, outdated, and ignores fast-growing startups and midsize businesses. On the one hand, there are basic accounting programs like QuickBooks designed for small businesses. On the other hand, the complex Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems of software giants like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft can cost millions of dollars and require an army of consultants and technicians to operate.

Stanton and Thomas designed Avise to fill the gap in the middle. They want to give startups the same tools that the S&P 500 companies use, but without the high cost and high maintenance. With a dynamic design, cloud computing, a collaborative interface, and live data, Avise can serve as a robust ledger and provide real-time analysis on a company’s financial health. The founders say the software can quickly integrate with existing databases such as Quickbooks and provide a live accounting dashboard to help drive strategy and decisions. “I’ve been frustrated throughout my career with back office software,” Stanton says. “At the beginning, it’s really important. It’s hard to get an overview of the business and know what you need to do to tick all the right boxes when it comes to accounting and compliance. There is a vacuum in the market that has become an obsession in my mind.

On the sly until today, Avise closed a $ 5.5 million funding round in August 2020 led by FinTech Collective plus the capital of Raga Partners, GGV and the co-founders of Stanton’s Peloton.

Stanton, who is the CEO of Avise, brings Peloton learned tips to spice up the CFO software world. “User experience must come first. Before Peloton, fitness equipment was a series of flashing lights. No one cared about the user experience. It was sad. The same is true of financial software today. We are building this for the accountants who use the product.

Thomas, a professional accountant and COO of Avise, knows the pain firsthand. “For years, I’ve been giving a software company feedback on ways to improve products, and no one has listened… With Graham’s insight into cutting-edge consumer technology, we can create something better than what currently exists. ”

To help create a user-friendly, design-based product, Stanton and Thomas recruited Peloton’s original UX creator, Eric Hwang (who also created Peloton’s famous “P” logo).

Stanton and Thomas decided to quit their jobs to start Avise while vacationing in Iceland in 2019. The couple, who graduated from Harvard in 2005, met during the freshman orientation and were roommates from second to second. the last year.

After graduation, Stanton joined billionaire Barry Diller’s internet portfolio company, IAC, first as an engineer at Pronto.com, then headed up shopping benchmark website Gifts.com. Thomas, who grew up in Sierra Leone, became an accountant. His first gig was at Deloitte, and he then returned to Sierra Leone during the 2015 Ebola outbreak to manage the finances of Partners In Health. There, he oversaw more than $ 35 million in international aid to treat victims and contain the pandemic. “It was a crazy experience. Sierra Leone was largely a cash economy, and I remember going to the Central Bank to withdraw 500 million Leones, and they had no money on hand to give us the money we needed.

Stanton had won a multi-million dollar windfall after Peloton’s IPO in 2019 and was looking to start a new business. “I guess I must be addicted to wrestling.” He and Thomas had been talking about launching a software startup for years, and on a trip through Icelandic nature, Stanton convinced Thomas, then chief accounting officer at Alnylam Pharmaceuticals in Boston, to start Avise with him.

Stanton and Thomas closed the round in August 2020 in the midst of the Covid pandemic and spent containment building a prototype. Avise has 11 employees and is launching a private Alpha test version to share with its network of startup founders. The beta is coming in the fall.

As Peloton has grown from fitness equipment to a tight-knit community with four million paying members and a growing apparel business, Stanton is tight-lipped on Avise’s merch strategy. “We have a few face masks lying around, but yes we will have to improve our game.”