“A successful Australian exit”: E-commerce startup OneSaas acquired by Intuit Quickbooks

Sydney e-commerce data integration startup OneSaas has been acquired by Intuit Quickbooks, having ridden the online shopping wave over the past decade, and the tidal surge over the past 12 months.

OneSaas was founded in 2010, to solve a problem founder Corneliu Tusnea was experiencing himself.

Tusnea ran several online board game stores at the time, he tells SmartCompany, and was finding himself getting overwhelmed by the manual processes required.

He built a tool to automate some of those processes, and soon realised there would likely be a demand for it.

Now, the product allows e-commerce businesses to integrate various apps, automating everything from accounting and billing to fulfilment and inventory management.

As people started to develop more of an understanding of the opportunities e-commerce presented, the market started to grow. And Tusnea was there to meet it.

As of 2020, OneSaas was partnered with the likes of Bigcommerce, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace and Etsy.

For these businesses to be able to support small business, they needed to offer integration, the founder notes.

“A business needs a lot of things to work together,” he says.

“Those partnerships help us grow tremendously.”

This is a sector that has changed almost beyond recognition in the past 10 years, Tusnea says. But, over the past 12 months, “COVID definitely made the whole thing explode”.

He calls products such as OneSaas the “backbone for e-commerce”, and as the sector has grown, it’s grown too.

Tusnea doesn’t share any specific growth figures, or the value of the acquisition.

But, he does call it “a successful Australian exit”.

“We’re happy,” he adds.

According to Intuit, parent company to accounting software provider Quickbooks, the acquisition will improve the integration capabilities of QuickBook Commerce — a new product designed to help small businesses manage various sales channels.

Quickbook Commerce will launch in the US first, with ‘high priority’ international markets following.

Tusnea never necessarily considered an acquisition as an exit point he was working toward. But, he says the business had reached a pivotal moment.

In partnership with Intuit Quickbooks, he felt the business could support more small businesses and pick up the pace in terms of growth.

“We can go much bigger as a team,” he says.

And that’s a sentiment that’s in tune with his whole leadership style. He credits a lot of OneSaas’s success to his employees, and urges other leaders to place trust in their own.

Decisions within the business are made democratically, he says, rather than one person dictating commands.

Focusing on teamwork, bringing different minds together and trusting your employees’ judgement helps drive a business forward “in a more determined way”, he explains.

“Everybody pushes in the same direction … everybody is on board.”

When asked what’s next for Tusnea himself, the founder stresses that he has no intention of stepping away from the business, letting go of the reins, or even taking a day off any time soon.

He’s not at the top of the mountain yet, he says. There’s plenty to achieve before he reaches the summit.

“I don’t feel like I’m handing over anything. I feel like I’ve just opened a new path for me and my team,” he explains.

“It’s too exciting … I don’t want to lose the momentum,” he adds.

“My plan is to push this product to much higher heights.”