“Can a lean, all-in-one CRM own the entire back office of the single-person service business without becoming a fintech itself?”
17hats was founded in 2014 by Donovan Janus after a 2011 NYT article on the trials of solo entrepreneurs. Positioned as an all-in-one CRM/quote/contract/invoice tool for service-driven single-person businesses (photographers, coaches, designers). Payments are a core hook — Stripe for cards/ACH and Square are the merchant options — but 17hats itself is not a regulated financial entity; embedded finance sits entirely on partner rails. In 2023 the founder handed the CEO role to Amanda Rae and the product has been consolidated into a single tier with SMS texting, pipelines, and scheduling baked in.
17hats processes payments through Stripe, Square, PayPal and Authorize.net. Disclosed money-movement rails: ACH.
17hats connects to bank accounts through Plaid, Finicity and Yodlee.
17hats integrates with QuickBooks Online, Xero (limited) and Zapier.
The Embedded Finance Index 2026 maps 4 layers in 17hats's stack: Payments / PSP (Stripe, Square, PayPal and Authorize.net); Money movement (ACH); Open banking (Plaid, Finicity and Yodlee); Accounting (QuickBooks Online, Xero (limited) and Zapier).
17hats was founded by Donovan Janus and Rhesa Rozendaal and is founded in 2012, headquartered in Pasadena, CA, United States.
17hats has raised $5.3M+ (disclosed) in total (latest round: Series A, 2015).
Get a read on where your own stack stands against 17hats and the rest of its category — what they built versus bought, which providers they use, and where the gaps in your own strategy and competitive set actually are.