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Divvy has raised capital quickly, including a  and both its and in 2018. Toss in the company’s quarter billion dollar debt financing and its new, $200 million equity round and the company has accreted just over $500 million in capital to-date.

Even in today’s era of large rounds and venture pre-emption (VCs going to companies, looking to invest, instead of companies going to VCs, looking for investment), Divvy’s capital story is fast.

So, I got on the phone with the company to try and figure it out. Here’s what I found out.

Divvy

A quick word about what Divvy does. The firm provides expense and budget tooling for businesses. That means employee access to company credit with company-set limits, further corporate card distribution, and expensing help.

Notably, Divvy manages to charge nothing for its service as it makes money from interchange fees (a small cut of what users spend on their Divvy cards). This model should be familiar to regular Crunchbase News readers as a similar monetization model to what (more here) and (more here) use. It’s worth noting at this point that Divvy told this publication that it does not want to become a bank.

Divvy also says that it isn’t competing with Brex, a buzzy tech startup which is working vertical-by-vertical to improve corporate credit cards. Instead, Divvy wants to provide teams and individuals with access to set spend for projects and more, essentially providing access to slices of the firm’s credit to employees. Its product is aimed at whole companies, instead of just regular recipients of corporate cards (executives, founders, etc.).

It’s an interesting model. Expense software is notoriously bad. Corporate credit cards are never given to everyone at a company. Divvy wants to take on both at the same time.

And, as its service is free, it’s seen rapid uptake. In conversation with Crunchbase News, Divvy co-founder described the company’s product-market-fit (tech jargon for how well a product or service meets the needs and wants of the market at a reasonable price point) as “crazy.” The phrasing was repeated several times during the conversation.

That level of product-market-fit explains quite a lot about Divvy. Good fit between an offered service and market demand usually implies rapid growth. And it’s that growth that explains how and why Divvy has raised so much, so quickly.

Utah

A final note on Utah. Divvy is yet another quickly-growing tech company to come out of the state. Other recent Utah successes include (sold to SAP before it went public), (now public), and others. Other Utah companies known to be growing quickly include (notes on its revenue expansion here), and .

Venture funds are also putting more focus on the area.

I bring Utah’s tech scene up as it’s a fascinating story of a startup scene that is doing precisely what so many cities, regions, and even countries have tried to do. Namely, to build a Silicon Valley in a place that isn’t Silicon Valley. Naturally, the so-called Silicon Slopes of Utah aren’t as big as their Californian cousin, but the state is doing very well all the same.

Illustration: .

, a Utah-based software company focused on building tools for offline business, has raised . Most of it came in two rounds, a massive in May of 2017, and a from this June.

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Coverage of startups focuses too much on their fundraising. That’s in part because startups mostly will not share numbers, apart from their recent round size. Most startups that raise money won’t even share their valuation, so getting revenue notes out of them is difficult.

Podium, however, is willing to share. Collating notes from a dinner last night, here’s how Podium has grown during its life: Podium was around the $12 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) mark when it raised its Series A. That’s pretty high for an A, which explains it managed to raise so much during the theoretically early-stage investment. By the end of 2017, the startup was doing around $30 million ARR.

Continuing, Podium is past the $50 million ARR mark today and expects to reach $60 million by the end of the year. Next year it wants to get to $100 million.

That strikes me as pretty quick, though I don’t know how it closely stacks up to or other companies that are sometimes touted as the fastest growing SaaS shops of all time. All the same, Podium has burned in the neighborhood of $16 million during its life (I double-checked that one with its president), which means it’s floating a huge pile of cash.

And that indicates we won’t see an IPO soon, I wouldn’t think. Why bother when things are going so quickly?

Final thought: Podium’s revenue growth implies that at least some companies that are raising in an outsized fashion aren’t totally bonkers. Though I wonder how many other Series B level companies that have similar levels of capital raised are as large. And that not every Utah-based company burns cash like .

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