supportpay gets $4m venture capital boost, adding more than 20 employees

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​Local Silicon Valley transplant SupportPay is expected to hire more than 20 more employees in East Sacramento after receiving $4 million in venture capital funds.

Local Silicon Valley transplant SupportPay is expected to hire more than 20 more employees in East Sacramento after receiving $4 million in venture capital funds.
Founded in 2011, SupportPay’s app is meant to help divorced or separated parents take care of child support payments and related expenses. The company relocated from Santa Clara to The Cannery business park off Alhambra and Stockton boulevards in August.
Sheri Atwood, founder and CEO of SupportPay and its parent company Ittavi (an acronym for "It Takes A Village"), told the Business Journal that $1 million of the venture capital is from Folsom-based Moneta Ventures.
Bethesda, Maryland-based Fenway Summer Ventures and Chicago’s Continental Advisors provided the rest of the funding. Since 2014, SupportPay has raised $7 million in venture capital.
The funds will go toward expanding SupportPay’s engineering, marketing and development departments, Atwood said.
SupportPay moved to Sacramento after it was courted by the Greater Sacramento Economic Council, as part of a regional economic-development strategy focused on encouraging Bay Area technology startups to the relocate here.
SupportPay's expansion may show the potential benefits of the strategy. The company recently hired three full-time employees, including a chief technology officer and a developer. And SupportPay now has eight open full-time jobs: four technical positions and four sales and marketing positions, Atwood said.
“Over the course of the next 18 months, we’re planning another 20 full-time" positions, Atwood told the Business Journal.
SupportPay also has five college intern positions available.
The company had nine employees when it moved to Sacramento in August, Atwood said.
Incentives for startups like SupportPay to move here from the Bay Area include the Sacramento region’s lower rents and cost of living; its talent base, which includes 318,000 students enrolled at four-year colleges; and the eighth-highest concentration of college graduates with degrees in science-, technology-, engineering- or math-related fields, according to U.S. Census Bureau statistics.
“Technology companies like SupportPay are vital for our community to help build an advanced economy in (the Sacramento region),” said Michelle Willard, the Greater Sacramento Economic Council’s director of public relations. “There has been growing interest for technology companies in our region who want access to the innovation ecosystem in California, but can’t afford to scale their companies in the Bay Area.”
Atwood became inspired to start SupportPay following her own experience trying to negotiate child support payments after her marriage ended. She said she is also the child of a divorce she called as “bad as it can get.”
The SupportPay app is offered in a free version and in a premium version that starts at $9.99 a month. It has 40,000 users in the U.S. and 20 other countries.
“We keep the records to protect both parents to prove whether they have or have not received payments,” Atwood said. “We do all the billing. It’s not getting a call or email from their ex saying, ‘You owe me money.’”
Atwood declined to release SupportPay’s revenue numbers, but said the company handles more than $30 million in monthly child support payments. SupportPay began charging for its app six months ago.
In addition to the shared-expenses and child support app, Atwood’s company has a directory of family law professionals to promote their services to SupportPay’s customers and web traffic.
SupportPay’s move to Sacramento could also help it to win government contracts. It's looking to collaborate with state systems for handling child support payments.
Atwood said the company is in talks with four states and several California counties, but didn't specify which ones. No agreements have been reached.
Vaibhav Nadgauda, general partner at Moneta Ventures, said his group decided to fund SupportPay because the company is in a very focused niche, with a lot of opportunity to grow. “There are hundreds of millions of dollars of transactions that happen in that space,” Nadgauda said. “We expect them to do really, really well.”