When you call one of its clients -- from small business to the likes of Google, Microsoft and Amazon -- you might not know you're talking to a Moneypenny employee. The Wales-based company with an office in North Charleston has a workforce of hundreds of receptionists. Receptionists have a dedicated list of clients, but they work out of Moneypenny offices. "Often we're our clients' best-kept secret," said Joanna Swash, the company's managing director. Swash said the idea behind Moneypenny is to provide an outsourced call service for businesses to let them "get on with what they do best."

Automated accounting startup Ceterus has closed a $10 million Series B funding round, led by Harbert Growth Partners with participation from investors TechOperators, GroTech Ventures, Idea Fund Partners, and Alerion Ventures. "We hope to leverage the funds by continuing to invest in our product. We raised our first round a little over two years ago, and with that, we did a lot to automate the process of bookkeeping," says Levi Morehouse, founder and CEO. "What we hope to do now is to continue that effort, but to move toward automating analysis and insights -- giving the small business entrepreneurs that use our product visibility and analysis on what may happen in the future using all of the data that we have, related to the history of what they've done." Charleston-based Ceterus solves two problems with its automated one-stop accounting platform.