Small American businesses still mailed paper checks to pay most of their bills when Bill.com started. An invoice came in the mail. Someone typed it into the books, walked it to the owner for a signature, and stuffed an envelope. Bill.com moved all of that online. It sold mostly through accounting firms, which ran the books for thousands of small clients. It went public in December 2019, a few months before the pandemic emptied offices.

A Founder Who Knew Payments

René Lacerte founded Bill.com in Palo Alto in 2006. His bet was that the back office of a small business was a payments problem. Bill.com read incoming invoices, routed them for approval, and paid them by bank transfer. It also sent invoices and collected money. Each payment that passed through earned the company a small fee. Accountants could run the bills for many clients from one screen.

Sixty-One Percent Up

Bill.com priced its IPO at $22 a share on December 11, 2019, above its range. It began trading on the New York Stock Exchange the next day as BILL and closed at $35.50, up 61 percent. Remote work made it more useful. It bought Divvy and Invoice2go in 2021 and renamed itself BILL. After activist investors pushed for a sale in 2025, it stayed public and still trades on the NYSE.

Cover: Bank-Notes, Paper-Money, James Gillray. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for paper money (payments).