Tell us about your background and what inspired you to become an accountant?
What inspired me to become an accountant initially, actually stemmed from the idea that numbers are universal across a global scale. When I immigrated to the US from Kazakhstan, I was just 20 years old. I hadn’t learned English at that point, and was working odd jobs before falling into the path of becoming an accountant. My parents told me accounting was “easy” because it was universal/the same in every country, and could be taken everywhere, so from there, I went on to earn a degree in finance management. After working in the field for a few years, I began to gain the confidence I needed to go off on my own and create my own company. I bootstrapped AG Accounting, for venture-backed start-ups in Silicon Valley, which oversaw 800+ start-ups – and that’s where the idea and seed for JustPaid was born.
When you say accounting is universal across a global scale, what does that mean?
Numbers are the same everywhere, so there’s no barriers in accounting like there are with other language-based fields. Unlike marketing, which varies between cultures, accounting has no variation – numbers are numbers, it’s black and white.
Why do you believe there is a global accounting issue?
There are so many small businesses and not enough accountants to help with their finances. Not to mention, there’s not enough accountants that would be able to plow through thousands of data points and financials quickly and efficiently to get founders what they need when they need it. JustPaid solves this issue by giving users a 24/7 accountant right in their back pocket – to be able to ask the most specific or general questions you may need quick answers to in order to keep your business running as efficiently as possible – all powered by a proprietary AI financial co-pilot.
How does JustPaid seek to address the problem?
I realized that billing is solved on the engineering side, but there wasn’t a solve-all for finance. That’s initially what inspired me to look into the idea of using AI to create JustPaid. I connected with Daniel Kivatinos (my co-founder and previously at DrChrono) and Vinay Pinnaka (our third co-founder who helps on the dev side), and since then, we have been solving a massive issue for thousands of businesses globally.
How else can small businesses benefit for JustPaid?
They don’t have to pay an accountant or accounting team to do comprehensive accounting work for them. They save money, time, AND can even be proactive in their work, given that JustPaid is available 24/7 to answer any finance-related questions they can think of.
What’s next for you and the brand?
We are excited to continue developing the product, and most recently, we integrated Avalara into the platform to automatically calculate sales tax, VAT, GST, and other transactional taxes in real-time across multiple jurisdictions. We are also integrating with Common Paper, to provide a seamless end-to-end contract workflow for customers.
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Anelya Grant, co-founder of JustPaid
Anelya co-launched her company JustPaid in 2023, which is a tech and AI company built from a need to help B2B receivables collection platforms for modern finance teams. The brand was founded in part based on Anelya’s own frustrations when running her own business. Before starting JustPaid, Grant was a founder and CEO of AG Accounting, Inc. - which focused on back office support for venture backed high growth tech startups. Initially, she was working only with California based companies and then grew to the global market. At AG Accounting, she worked with companies such as Segment, TaskRabbit, DrChrono, and over 800+ businesses. JustPaid has grown and launched into an AI-powered financial controller that automates invoicing and collections from the sales contracts, saving their users 100+ hours per month and reducing the number of days to collect.
