BizBot: What It Was, and What It Is Now

BizBot was a Norwegian fintech company founded in 2017. It built software for the administrative work that sits around owning and running a company: cap tables, share issuance, contracts with investors, and reporting to the authorities.

This page is kept as a record rather than removed. Some of what the company learned is still the reason this site exists, and an earlier version of this page described the product in the present tense long after it had stopped being sold. That was misleading, so it has been rewritten.

What the company built

The product was aimed at founders and investors dealing with the paperwork of ownership. In practice that meant:

• Creating and maintaining a cap table that stayed correct as ownership changed
• Running share issues end to end, including the investor agreements around them
• Handling the reporting that follows, so the register and the filings agreed with each other
• Board and shareholder meeting records

The bet was that this work is nearly identical across thousands of small companies, is done badly by most of them, and is expensive to fix once it has drifted.

The company

BizBot was based in Norway and went through TheFactory’s Fintech accelerator in 2018. It raised early funding, including from Innovation Norway, grew to around a dozen people, and counted Danske Bank among its customers. It presented again at TheFactory’s Fall 2019 programme as a digital CFO and shareholder management platform.

What it taught us about founder admin

This is the part worth keeping, because it turned out to apply well beyond cap tables, and it is the thinking behind how software is reviewed on this site now.

• The cost is rarely the task. It is the reconstruction. Producing a VAT return, a board pack or a cap table is quick if the underlying records agree with each other. Most of the work is establishing which of three versions is current. Software helps when it removes the second copy, and hurts when it becomes a third.
• Cap tables and board records pay off at one specific moment. That moment is due diligence. Between funding rounds the discipline feels like pure overhead, which is precisely why it lapses, and why the scramble happens later at the worst possible time.
• Compliance deadlines are a memory problem before they are a software problem. A shared calendar with the right dates in it solves most of this for very little money. What a system adds is that it keeps working after the person who held the dates in their head leaves.
• Integrations are only as good as the field mapping. Connecting an accounting system to a project tool is the easy half. Agreeing what a customer, a project and a cost centre mean in both systems is the half that stalls these projects.
• Automation inherits whatever process you had. If your approval chain is unclear now, automating it produces an unclear approval chain that runs without anyone watching it.

A note on the numbers that used to be here

An earlier version of this page carried three customer success stories, each with a precise percentage attached. None named a real customer, and none of the figures came from a measurement anyone made. They have been removed. This is BizBot’s own page about BizBot, which is exactly why claims a reader cannot check do not belong on it.

If you want a number that means something about your own admin burden, measure it before you change anything: how many hours a month go on finance and legal admin, how many corrections you make, and what you are routinely late for. Measure the same things again six months later.

What BizBot is now

BizBot today is a directory of business admin software: 98 tools, each with a written review that says what the tool is bad at as well as what it does well. The through-line from the original company is the same question that started it, which is how much unnecessary administrative work sits between someone with a business and someone actually running one.

See About BizBot for how the directory works, or how we evaluate software for where the product information comes from.