Gradient MSP Raises $10 Million, Launches Billable

‘We’re hiring a whole lot of people,’ says Colin Knox CEO of Gradient MSP. ‘We are looking for the best and brightest talent that truly love MSPs, really understand the IT channel and want to have an impact on making it as good a world as it can be for everybody that’s involved.’

Canada-based Gradient MSP recently raised $10M in Series A funding to boost integrations and business automation needs, optimize operations, hire more team members and launch its new platform.

Billable, the platform which went live last week, is an automated billing reconciliation solution to tie in and attach to a business’ resale stack in their professional services automation solution.

“In our own conversations with MSPs, and conversations we had with channel vendors, the No. 1 thing they said is, ‘We get smacked over our heads every single month, almost every day with our partners begging us to integrate with their PSA so they can just bill their stuff at the end of the month,’” Colin Knox, CEO of Gradient MSP, told CRN.

“It’s kind of crazy to think that as much as PSA solutions have evolved and improved over the years, MSPs are still doing this billing reconciliation process,” he added. “We’re taking all the solutions they resell across all of their client contracts and trying to figure out who’s added some, who’s removed some, who’s even using what. We still do it like it’s 1999.”

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The problem with vendors, he said, is that they’re so focused on building the best platform they offer that they don’t build the most integrated one.

“There’s so many PSA products on the market now,” he said. “For them to reach the entire market they’d have to spend countless time building one-by-one all of these integrations with all of these PSAs. That would defer them from building the best solution that they could build. We’ve been able to solve that.”

Monies from the series A funding will also go towards hiring 50 additional team members by the end of Q1 2022, up from the 13 employees they had in November. Funds will also help expand its partner resources to include more in-person and on-demand training, events and research.

The investment was led by Menlo Park, Calif.-based investment firm Anthos Capital with participation from StoneMill Ventures, Gula Tech Adventures and Accelerate Fund III.

“The things that we’re most excited about for next year is continuing to innovate on technology, ensuring that we have the right team and the right people in place to be able to serve the channel, both the vendors as well as the MSPs, and then engagement and MSP enablement,” David Goldie, VP of channel for Gradient, told CRN.

Goldie said new hires will help in research and development, market initiatives, partner success and channel engagement.

“Our growth is going to come through MSPs and helping MSPs to be successful, and that’s MSPs of every size,” he said. “We are definitely passionate about small businesses, helping small businesses, small MSPs and small businesses that they serve. Every business in the world should have the right IT partner to thrive in the modern business world and also to survive any risk to their business whether it be a pandemic, a security risk or any other business risk.”

For Knox (pictured above), the $10 million in funding is an investment in the MSP industry and in the market as a whole.

“It’s an investment that can really drive success for everybody, ease market access and level up the entire industry,” he said.