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Bill.com Is Set To Acquire Utah Billion-Dollar Software Startup Divvy

Less than five months after vaulting to a $1.6 billion valuation, Divvy, an expense reporting startup for small businesses, is in talks to be acquired.  

Bill.com, a cloud software-based platform that helps small and midsize businesses with back-office financial operations, is Divvy’s expected buyer, two sources tell Forbes. The companies may be planning to announce the deal as soon as Thursday, when Bill.com, which currently carries a market cap of about $12 billion, is scheduled to report first-quarter earnings. 

Update: Bill.com announced it was acquiring Divvy on Thursday afternoon for approximately $2.5 billion, confirming Forbes’s scoop.

Terms of the acquisition were not yet known, but a third source told Forbes that Bill.com had approached Divvy in the past with an offer of more than $2 billion, suggesting the company would expect at least that price, if not more. 

Divvy didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment; Bill.com declined to comment. On Tuesday prior to the news, shares of Bill.com were down about 8% from yesterday’s closing price.

Since launching in February 2018, Divvy says it has signed up more than 9,000 customers, per a company blog post. The startup, named a Forbes Next Billion Dollar Startup in 2019, offers an alternative to the corporate credit card for small businesses who don’t have the means to dole them out to staff. With Divvy, customers receive credit cards with limits predetermined by their finance managers, who set a budget for a project to “divvy” up among workers, eliminating the need for expense reports from competitors like Concur or Expensify. 

Founded by Blake Murray and Alex Bean in 2015, Lehi, Utah-based Divvy took in more than $32 million in revenue in 2019, the company told Forbes in a 2020 profile. The pandemic boosted Divvy, which has said new customers sign-ups surged 500% from March 2020 through January 5, 2021. The company announced a $165 million funding round that month, after raising $200 million in April 2019. 

The news comes on the heels of a hot deal-cutting quarter. Globally, a record $1.77 trillion in M&A transactions were announced through the first four months of 2021—up 124% year-over-year from 2020, and 10% higher than the first four months of any other year on record, according to market data firm Refinitiv. 

Divvy is far from the only startup chasing expense reports and corporate credit cards or their equivalents. Brex raised $425 million at a $7.4 billion valuation in April. Earlier that month, Ramp raised $115 million at a $1.6 billion valuation. 

Last year, Murray, Divvy’s CEO, disputed that it directly competed with such rivals, arguing the market was fast-growing and big enough for multiple players. “When customers get it, they say, ‘Holy crap, this does more than we thought it was going to do,’” he said at the time. But it appears that soon, at least one leading startup in this market will have cashed out.

Additional reporting by Nina Wolpow.