Rho, Rho, Rho the Boat … to Better Business Banking
By Sam Fort, Randy Glein, and Sam Shapiro
Over the past decade, DFJ Growth has had a front-row seat witnessing and investing behind the explosion of innovation in financial technology. However commercial banking is an area of the market that has lagged, experiencing little progress during that time — until now. Today, we are excited to announce our investment in the $75 million Series B round for Rho, an emerging leader in digital-first business banking. Rho is tackling the challenge of reinventing commercial banking head-on, and we are thrilled to partner with co-founders Everett Cook and Alex Wheldon on the journey ahead.
We know the bank account is the central hub of all financial transactions in a business. This makes the relationship between a business and its banking provider highly strategic since the bank facilitates the flow of payments and serves as the hub for tracking cash flows, transactions, and overall financial management. Rho is helping to modernize this relationship by bringing a software-based and automation-centric framework to business banking.
We are inspired by Rho’s vision of “self-driving finance” — an end-state where the back-office finance operation captures real-time data and uses AI to deliver proactive insights and recommendations.
Rho is positioned to enable this future by providing the software and data analytics capabilities to optimize borrowing and savings, reconcile invoices, schedule payments, identify abnormalities, and more. In the future, this should happen with little manual intervention as the Rho software suite captures the movement of money and makes decisions automatically.
Rho got its start by creating a technology-enabled business bank account that tracks the movement of funds in and out of a business. This has evolved rapidly into a full-stack commercial banking suite, featuring a portfolio of products that includes banking, corporate cards, bill payment, and expense management.
Rho’s solution is purpose-built for small and mid-sized enterprises, which have been left behind as the large incumbent banks and corporate card issuers have focused upstream.
This is the opportunity being seized by Rho. The company’s intense focus on product excellence and superior service levels has led to glowing customer feedback, an exceptionally high NPS compared to incumbent banking products, and dramatic growth of more than 10x in revenue over the past year.
As with any startup, the team of people involved makes all the difference. Rho is a shining example of this people principle — with co-founders Everett Cook and Alex Wheldon being core to our investment rationale. They bring complementary strengths and experience that collectively drive Rho’s mission forward, coupled with a bold vision of the future that has already attracted a world-class team and hundreds of customers realizing the benefits of this vision and the initial products it has spawned. And they are just getting started.
We are so proud to partner with Everett, Alex, and the Rho team as they create the new standard in modern business banking. Let’s go, Rho!
