Web hosting provider GoDaddy has just announced its purchase of Outright, a cloud-based financial management application company.
The acquisition brings together two companies that serve small businesses and entrepreneurs in different ways, and signals that GoDaddy may be looking to expand its range of products and services for businesses.
Outright’s mission is to automate small business accounting tasks by providing simple, data-driven and community-enabled applications. Outright gives users the ability to automatically import data from popular online marketplaces such as eBay, Amazon, and Etsy, as well as from bank accounts, credit cards, and PayPal.
The company aims to streamline the whole financial management process so that business owners can spend more of their valuable time on tasks that grow their businesses and less time calculating profits, income, taxes, expenses, and other financial information.
This acquisition means that Outright’s more than 200,000 customers will now have access to GoDaddy’s complete line of products and services, including customer service specialists. However, Outright’s CEO Steven Aldrich assured customers on Outright’s blog today that the services provided by Outright will not be changing because of the acquisition.
Outright offers a free account for business owners, along with Outright Plus, which offers more features such as quarterly and sales tax tracking and reporting for $9.95 per month. The company also offers an iPhone app.
Outright was founded by entrepreneur Ben Curren, who started his own business in 2006 and quickly became frustrated with the financial management process and the amount of time he was spending with spreadsheets rather than actually running his business. He then developed an automated software application to help with the problem, and that eventually became Outright.
Curren, Aldrich and the rest of the Outright team will join the GoDaddy team and continue to work out of Silicon Valley. The amount of the acquisition was not disclosed.
No doubt this deal will help the godaddy in creating more business due to solving users problem who were wasting their precious time that should be dedicated to do their main business.
Thanks for updating this news here !
Hi Annie,
This is a surprise move. If you had asked me to name 100 potential acquirers of Outright, I could think of at least that many, but would never have pegged GoDaddy as one of those interested in buying the accounting software company ….
– Anita
This is a really odd acquisition. It appears with this move GoDaddy wants to start turning into a conglomerate that serves small business by providing many different services.
It will be interesting how this will impact the current GoDaddy brand over the long run.
What do you see happening Anita?
Wow. This is completely out of left field. I don’t have much experience with Outright but a few of my accounting clients have been asking for my input on it so I’ve been meaning to check them out. I’m going to keep my eye on this.
Makes total sense. Godaddy will be on an acquisition roll over the next several years to set up for their IPO. The IPO was unsuccessful in 2006, income stream diversification coupled with market instability caused it. Late in 2011 a group of hedge funds and VC’s (KKR, Silver Lake Partners and Technology Crossover Ventures) purchased a large stake in the company. Bob Parsons wanted to cash out for awhile.
Outright was backed by Sequoia Capital, First Round Capital, Shasta Ventures, and SoftTech VC.
These hedge funds and VC’s consistently talk to one another about M&A opportunities. This was one of them.