Xero Blog

Today we announced Xero passed 1 million subscribers worldwide on our global cloud accounting platform. It’s a milestone which seemed so far away when, just five years ago, at 50,000 subscribers we said to our shareholders “imagine what we look like at a million customers”.

20x growth at that time seemed like a stretch to many, but we believed in what we were doing and set our investments to build a business that would get to a million subscribers and beyond.

Not many business software companies get anywhere near a million subscribers. Yet as far as we can tell, of the more than hundred million small businesses out there in the world, only a few million are currently running any type of cloud accounting software. So we’re still just at the start.

From our beginnings sitting around the kitchen table in a small apartment in New Zealand to serving customers in more than 180 countries today, our success is thanks to you.

We want to thank our 100,000 business advisors – accountants and bookkeepers, who make the Xero dream of empowering small businesses a reality. Thank you for pioneering the world of cloud accounting with us. Your support, ideas, feedback and patience has helped us shape and build the global accounting platform that we have today.

To the small business owners who are the engine room of our global economy – you are the ones who create jobs and prosperity. Thank you for choosing Xero to help you run your business.

To our more than 500 app partners who help unlock productivity for small business, we make quite a team. We’ve built one of the biggest small business ecosystems in the world. With more than 35,000 developers in our Xero ecosystem, the traffic to our API receives more than 10 million calls per day. Our Xerocon events attract more than 4,000 accountants and bookkeepers each year across the globe. So, there are plenty of ways to help our ecosystem get in front of businesses who need apps. Thank you for being a key part of our thriving small business ecosystem.

To our more than 1,600+ exceptional product development and support people who contribute to Xero’s success every day, you have transformed us from an idea to a global platform, which in the past 12 months alone saw $1.2 trillion worth of economic activity transacted. Thank you for doing the best work of your lives.

Thank you to our Xero Shareholders who have given us the resources to build a global community that is doing so much good in the world.

Xero is bigger than all of us now. A million subscribers depend on us every day. They are creating jobs and changing lives. I’m more confident than ever that we’re building one of the world’s most important ecosystems with the potential to use technology to transform how business works. There are no limits to how big this can get.

Over ten years, Xero has evolved from a startup, to a challenger into one of the leading global accounting platforms. The first challenger to surpass one million subscribers is a significant milestone for cloud accounting and a validation for an industry that didn’t even exist a decade ago. Together, with our accounting partners and small business owners, we’re so excited to drive innovation in our industry.

The pace of cloud adoption is accelerating. It was less than two years ago that we celebrated reaching 500,000 subscribers.

That goes to show, this is just the beginning, and with the possibilities machine learning, automation and artificial intelligence open up, we’re only just getting started.