How Intuit Ventures is scaling to support startups

Intuit Ventures is ramping up with new hires and two new investments as it builds a corporate venture capital fund to accelerate innovation for small businesses and consumers.

Intuit Ventures text in white over a blue gradient background.

Intuit knows what it means to start small with large ambitions. Our journey began 40 years ago when our founder, Scott Cook, watched his wife struggle to balance the family checkbook at their kitchen table. From that moment on we’ve been relentlessly focused on finding better ways to solve our customers’ most pressing problems through technology. Our desire to help entrepreneurs and small businesses succeed continues to drive us, and we’re excited to further this legacy through our work at Intuit Ventures where we collaborate with startups to achieve their goals and make a meaningful impact on people’s lives. 

I’m excited to have recently joined Intuit to help build an enduring corporate venture capital fund that supports startups across the world. I bring a unique perspective to the table, having been a founder and then at Microsoft for 8 years where I played a key role in growing Microsoft’s VC arm to a portfolio of over 130 companies. These experiences have taught me a lot of lessons about how to build a venture capital program within a large company, and how to help startups navigate the complexities of corporate partnerships.

The Intuit Ventures team is now ramping up our investing program with two new investments that we are announcing today. We also brought on two new team members to help us accelerate investments and work closely with our growing portfolio: 

  • Selina Troesch who recently joined from Touchdown Ventures where she was the first employee and helped to launch corporate ventures programs for companies like Scotts Miracle-Gro, Edelman, and 20th Century Fox.
  • Tanvi Lal, a former consultant with Deloitte who worked with Cowboy Ventures and Concrete Rose Ventures during her MBA and co-founded VC Unleashed.

I am thrilled to welcome both of these investors to our team and Intuit. Selina and Tanvi bring a wealth of experience and a large network for helping Intuit Ventures and our portfolio companies grow and achieve our goals.

Our Purpose

Intuit’s mission is to power prosperity around the world in support of small businesses and consumers, and this mission is at the core of what drives us as investors. We believe that we’ll have more success in solving our customers’ problems by accelerating innovation outside our walls. We know that in order to achieve our ambitious goals we’ll need to work with cutting-edge startups of all sizes to learn about the evolving landscape of technology, consumer behavior, and small business needs. By investing in and supporting startups, Intuit aims to create an ecosystem of innovation to better serve our customers and push fintech forward.

With 10 million small businesses and 93 million consumers across our suite of products, we also have an incredible ecosystem for helping startups scale and achieve their goals. We aim to be much more than a capital provider, and will work closely with our portfolio companies to support them with access to customers, partners, and knowledge through connections to Intuit. We’re grateful to have this opportunity to work with world-class founders and collaborate with them to solve the biggest pain points for small businesses and consumers.  We are just getting started, but wanted to take this opportunity to reaffirm our strategy and investment focus.

Intuit Ventures’ Strategy

  • Stage: We invest in series A-C rounds in companies that have achieved product-market fit.
  • Investment Focus: B2B fintech, consumer fintech, intelligent apps for small businesses, commerce, enabling technology, and crypto/blockchain.
  • Investment Size: $2-10 million non-lead checks, targeting 8-12 investments per year.
  • Strategy: We aim to balance financial return and strategic value to Intuit and our portfolio companies. We’ll be independent in our decision-making, and don’t require any commercial relationships to be in place to make an investment. 
  • Partnership: We’ll support our portfolio companies post-investment by helping them to build close relationships with key contacts across Intuit and our ecosystem.

Announcing Our Latest Investments

We’ve been busy in the last few months and are excited to announce two of our latest investments:

  • Drata – Small businesses and startups need to show proof of their security posture in order to scale and serve larger companies, but compliance has historically been manual, painful, and costly. Drata solves this by helping companies of all sizes easily maintain compliance with frameworks such as SOC-2 and GDPR. Drata uses automation to continually scan, monitor, and analyze against hundreds of security controls to help them prepare for audits and protect their users’ data. This automation-led approach helps SMBs to remain in compliance and saves them immense amounts of time and money in the process. We are looking forward to working with Drata to help make the process of security and compliance seamless for our joint customers.

“It’s an incredible opportunity to have Intuit Ventures participating in Drata’s Series C financing, given our shared commitment to empowering small businesses,” said Adam Markowitz, Co-Founder and CEO of Drata. “We look forward to finding ways to pair our risk and compliance automation platform with Intuit’s vast resources providing millions of small businesses with the right software and tools to scale.”

  • Vestwell – Vestwell helps small businesses provide cost-effective retirement savings accounts of all types for their employees. We believe all employees deserve the same type of workplace savings accounts that big companies provide. Vestwell has made this possible with a platform that is leveraged by some of the world’s largest financial advisory firms like Morgan Stanley, and is powering state-sponsored programs in 6+ US states.  We’re excited by Vestwell’s approach and industry-leading technology to enable small business employees to build wealth and plan for their retirement.

These companies are highly aligned to Intuit’s mission, and are pioneers in their respective fields. We’re thrilled to be their investors and look forward to working with them in the years to come.

Get In Touch

If you are a company building in one of our focus areas and want to discuss an investment by Intuit Ventures, please submit information about your company and funding round here or get in touch at ventures@intuit.com.

Written by Adam Coccari

Adam Coccari is the Managing Director of Intuit Ventures, Intuit’s Venture Capital team responsible for overseeing Intuit’s investment in startups around the world. Prior to Intuit, Adam spent 8 years at Microsoft where he was most recently a Partner at M12 – Microsoft’s Venture Fund.