Copilot Platforms Inc., the developer of a cloud-based client management portal for service businesses, has secured $10 million in funding to support product development efforts.

The company announced the Series A investment on Thursday. According to the startup, the capital was provided by YC Continuity and prominent angel investor Lachy Groom. It has raised a total of $13 million since launching in early 2020. 

Law firms, recruiting agencies and other service businesses regularly share documents with client organizations. Such companies’ day-to-day business operations also involve a variety of other client interactions. They must collect payments, request signatures and answer support questions, to name a few common tasks. 

Copilot’s client management portal enables service businesses to perform such tasks through a centralized interface. Historically, businesses used multiple applications to support their client management activities. According to the company, consolidating the workflow in a single portal improves the user experience. 

“Before founding Copilot, our team started multiple companies and became the clients of dozens of service businesses,” co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Marlon Misra detailed in a blog post. “We kept asking ourselves why there wasn’t a central place that had our information, correspondence, files, contracts and invoices.”

Copilot’s platform is accessible through a web-based interface and a mobile app that each business can customize with its brand assets. The portal includes a messaging tool for sharing project details, as well as a built-in file storage service. The file storage service offers an electronic signature feature that makes it easier to process contracts.

Another set of features in the platform focuses on easing the payment processing workflow. Using the startup’s platform, service businesses can bill clients for one-time projects as well as offer subscriptions. A built-in checkout page enables clients to make payments on a self-service basis.

Copilot also promises to streamline other routine business tasks. To answer clients’ most frequent support inquiries, companies can use the platform to create a knowledge base. It also enables service businesses to build forms for collecting project-related information from clients.

To reduce manual work for users, Copilot provides an automation tool alongside its core feature set. The tool makes it possible to create software workflows that perform routine tasks without human input. A company could, for example, build a workflow that automatically creates a new folder in Copilot’s file sharing service when a new client project is launched. 

The features are organized into standalone apps, each of which focuses on a different use case such as customer support or payment processing. The startup also offers integrations with third-party productivity applications. Companies can embed those supported third-party applications into the Copilot interface to streamline tasks such as document management.

The proceeds from Copilot’s latest $10 million raise will go toward expanding its catalog of software integrations. It will grow its engineering and product teams to support the effort. 

“Hundreds of modern service businesses — marketing agencies, accounting firms, law firms, and others — run on Copilot to provide clients with a branded, unified, and delightful experience on web and mobile,” Misra said. “But there are tens of millions of service businesses in the U.S. alone, and we think we can help many of them be more successful.”

Image: Copilot