Recurly, a startup that makes it easy for other companies to manage their subscription billing, has closed a $1.6 million round of seed funding. The round is being led by Polaris Ventures, with participation from Harrison Metal (Michael Dearing), FreeStyle Capital (Dave Samuel and Josh Felser), Larry Mohr, Dave McClure’s recently-launched 500 Startups, Dharmesh Shah, Sherry Coutu, Babak Nivi, Naval Ravikant.

Recurly, the company that provides self-serve subscription billing management for small businesses, announced today that it is the first company to provide subscription billing management with automatic integration to Intuit’s merchant account and payment gateway service. This offering enables small businesses, who are interested in launching subscription-based businesses to assemble an end-to-end solution for subscription billing with payment gateway services, merchant account and automatic QuickBooks®integration in days rather than months.

Back in mid-November, we wrote about a new startup called Recurly which aimed to help other startups alleviate the pain of implementing subscription-based payment systems for their products. Since that time, Recurly has accepted 172 companies into their private beta, and feel comfortable enough handling that load that they’re opening to a public beta today.

Most startups have about a billion things to worry about. For many of them, this includes execution of their business model. With online ad networks depressed, increasingly, a number of those companies are starting to explore subscription-based models. But there are a dozen reasons why that can be a pain. Enter Recurly.