Yoseph West is co-founder and chief executive of Relay, the Toronto, Ontario, company that sells online business banking and money management to small businesses in the United States. He has spent most of his career in accounting software, which his family still struggles to explain.
The Son of a Persian Mother
At 16 he expected to become a lawyer. "He was like any good son of a Persian mother thinking of becoming a lawyer. Like there are two jobs, there's doctors and lawyers," he has said of his younger self. His brother's favourite game at family dinners is asking what he does for a living.
Wave and Hubdoc
At Wave, the accounting software company, he sold to solo entrepreneurs and freelancers and saw how vital accounting software was to them. Believing everyone was already in the cloud, he joined Hubdoc in early 2014 and found almost no one was. He led marketing there through its Xero acquisition. He came away convinced of how much accountants and bookkeepers care about their clients.
Founding Relay
Hubdoc showed him that business owners check their balance every day to decide what they can afford, yet bank feeds broke, duplicated transactions and left them without a full picture of cash flow. In 2018 he founded Relay with engineer Paul Klicnik. At its core, owners open several checking accounts and sort income into them for payroll, taxes and other costs, the method taught in Mike Michalowicz's book Profit First. Relay became its official banking partner and built direct feeds into QuickBooks Online and Xero, plus a single dashboard where accountants manage all their clients.
Growing Through a Hard Market
In May 2024, after passing 100,000 customers, Relay raised a $32.2 million Series B led by Bain Capital Ventures. "With the state of the FinTech funding market, and the opportunities that that presented, and the strength of our business, it made sense to take on more capital," he said.
He gave up on law for software nobody at home could describe. He now runs a banking platform that accountants, the people he most admires, use every day.
