Why We Invested in Current
More than half a trillion dollars flows through utilities every year, and roughly 45,000 US water utilities have fewer than 10,000 service connections. Every one needs a reliable way to turn meter data into revenue and close its books. Yet many small systems still rely on separate billing and payment software, paper records and, inevitably, a spreadsheet. When billing breaks, bills are missed or calculated incorrectly, collections slow and staff lose hours to manual work. The utility has less money for maintenance and infrastructure. Ratepayers feel it first through higher rates or deferred investment; when public systems cannot cover the gap, taxpayers can end up supporting it too.
Enter Current, a cloud-native billing and payments platform built specifically for small and mid-sized utilities. It brings the entire revenue cycle and the customer experience around it into one system built for the people who actually run utilities. It is a modern financial platform for a huge, fragmented and almost comically underserved market. Barrett Hansen, Jin Hock Ong and team, thanks for letting us follow the money. Here’s why we did it.
Infrastructure Is Only as Strong as Its Revenue Foundation
A utility billing system does much more than print a monthly statement. It turns meter reads into revenue, handles the exceptions that inevitably follow and produces the records finance teams and boards rely on. A mid-month customer move in, a corrected meter read or a rate change can send a legacy system into a maze of manual entries and support calls. The product turns the process into one continuous workflow, where meter data becomes a bill, payments reconcile to the right accounts and every adjustment carries an audit trail. Staff can run a billing cycle in minutes, catch exceptions before bills go out and correct mistakes without creating three more. Current reports that customers collect 3–5% more revenue in the first year, achieve three times greater autopay enrollment and reduce routine inbound calls by an average of 40%. As one customer put it, Current is “an easy way to do complicated things.” That is exactly what good vertical software should be.
Controlling the System of Record
The billing system is a utility’s revenue source of truth. It determines how revenue is calculated, collected and understood, connecting customer accounts to financial records and ultimately to infrastructure plans. The platform brings the revenue cycle and customer experience into one place, with integrations into systems such as GIS and field service. The result is fewer vendor handoffs and reconciliation that looks less like a monthly scavenger hunt. Owning that source of truth also creates room to grow: payments are already part of the product, and adjacent financial workflows can consolidate around it over time. Easier payments pull revenue forward and reduce delinquencies, while self-service lets customers understand and pay their bills without calling during office hours. Billing is the starting point. The larger opportunity is to become the financial operating system for essential infrastructure.
The Billing Software Replacement Cycle Has Begun
Local-government software is a roughly $35 billion annual industry, and utility billing is entering a generational refresh. Legacy contracts are aging, staffing shortages are making manual work untenable, ratepayers expect digital self-service and cloud infrastructure now makes smaller systems economical to serve. Incumbents have historically built for the largest utilities and sold everyone else a reduced version of something designed for somebody else the result being software built for everyone and loved by no one. Current inverted the model, starting with overlooked systems, designing around their actual staff and building a sales and onboarding process that can serve them efficiently. Utility customers can go live in weeks instead of enduring year-long implementations and painful migrations. That approach has now reached 80 utilities across 16 states. In a market where replacing billing software can be discussed for years, that adoption is an unusually strong signal. It also makes Current one of the fastest-growing businesses we have backed in a market many software companies dismissed as too fragmented and too small.
Proof, Not Promises
We have known Barrett for several years, and during that time we gave him what amounted to ten reasons that building Current would be difficult and a bad idea. The customers seemed too small. Switching costs looked too high. Procurement moved slowly, implementations were painful and incumbents had the advantage of trust. Each time, Barrett returned with evidence: disciplined founder-led sales, a clear understanding of what actually makes a utility switch and a repeatable migration process that gets customers live in weeks rather than years. That ability to turn objections into operating proof reflects the team’s complementary strengths. Barrett brings a decade of experience in fintech, analytics and B2B software, while Jin brings the software and AI development discipline required to build a financial system utilities can trust. Together, they move quickly without treating reliability as optional. That combination finally convinced us. Barrett, Jin and the Current team have earned utility trust one customer at a time and found a way to do it again and again.
Barrett, Jin and the entire Current team, thank you for bringing us aboard. Here’s to fewer spreadsheets, fewer mystery balances, fewer calls asking why a bill doubled—and financial plumbing as boring, reliable and invisible as it should be. Welcome to the Burnt Island.