René Lacerte is founder and chief executive of BILL, the San Jose, California, company whose software helps small and midsize businesses pay bills, get paid and manage spending. He started it in 2006 and chairs its board. He has spent his whole career on the back-office money of small firms.
Intuit and PayCycle
He holds a bachelor's degree in economics and a master's in industrial engineering from Stanford. He began at Intuit, where he launched its first connected payroll product and built its bill payment and credit card businesses. He then served as chief executive and chief financial officer of PayCycle, which became the largest online payroll service of its time before Intuit bought it.
From CashView to the NYSE
He founded the business as CashView in 2006 and renamed it Bill.com in 2008. He led its 2019 IPO on the New York Stock Exchange, then its purchases of the spend-management company Divvy and the invoicing app Invoice2go in 2021 and Finmark in 2022. The company's proxy statement credits him with growing it to nearly 1,500 employees and about half a million business customers.
Fiscal 2026
In the year to June 2026 BILL's revenue rose 13% to $1,653.2M, and core revenue rose 16% to $1,504.7M. It served 479,300 businesses, and 9.2 million network members had sent or received an electronic payment through it. "We continue to see strong demand for BILL's integrated platform, with increasing adoption of our AI capabilities," he said in the annual results.
He began by building payroll and bill pay inside Intuit. Twenty years after starting his own company, the bills of nearly half a million businesses run through it.
