London, UK -- July 20 2017 Receipt Bank, the award-winning bookkeeping automation platform and one of Europe’s fastest-growing businesses, has raised US$50 million in Series B funding from Insight Venture Partners. The investment will be used to accelerate the growth of the company and to further develop its products. The group passed US$10 million ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) in 2016 and continues to grow at more than 100% every year.
Receipt Bank has been revolutionising bookkeeping for small business since its launch in 2011. Working with the leading accountants and bookkeepers around the world, it was the first software company to automate the collection and data extraction of receipts and invoices. Today, Receipt Bank automates a range of bookkeeping processes for more than 5,000 accounting and bookkeeping firms and over 100,000 of their small business clients across the core markets of North America, EMEA and Australia.
An early adopter of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the company will be channeling further investment into its patent-pending technologies. This will ensure that Receipt Bank continues to help accountants, bookkeepers and small businesses to reduce the costs of bookkeeping, realise its benefits and move towards real-time accounting.
“Bookkeeping is at a pivotal point as automation technologies and artificial intelligence are bringing it out of the back office. With Receipt Bank, bookkeeping moves from a cost to a source of income – becoming the enabler of effective reporting, payments, lending and other value-adding services,” comments Alexis Prenn, CEO, Receipt Bank. “This investment will enable us to further develop our proprietary technologies and bring these services to even more leading accounting and bookkeeping firms and their small business clients.”
“Artificial intelligence has become a clear disruptor in several industries, including financial services,” said Brad Twohig, managing director at Insight Venture Partners. “Receipt Bank is an industry-leader in using emerging technology to drive core functions forward. We are excited to welcome them to the Insight Venture Partners portfolio, and look forward to their continued innovation in this space.”
The round of investment brings the total amount of funding raised by Receipt Bank to US$65 million.
About Receipt Bank
Receipt Bank has been revolutionising bookkeeping for small business since 2011. We pioneered automation in the collection and data extraction of receipts and expenses. Our award-winning artificial intelligence and automation technologies now help more than 5,000 accounting and bookkeeping firms across the globe create cost savings by unlocking the value of bookkeeping and real-time accounting. Backed by Insight Venture Partners and Kennet Partners we are signing up thousands of new customers every month and growing at more than 100% every year.
About Insight Venture Partners
Insight Venture Partners is a leading global venture capital and private equity firm investing in high-growth technology and software companies that are driving transformative change in their industries. Founded in 1995, Insight has raised more than $13 billion and invested in nearly 300 companies worldwide. Our mission is to find, fund and work successfully with visionary executives, providing them with practical, hands-on growth expertise to foster long-term success. For more information on Insight and all of its investments, visit www.insightpartners.com or follow us on Twitter: @insightpartners.
Vienna, Austria -- January 23 2017 Tricentis, raises $165 million from Insight Venture Partners to Deliver Continuous Testing at the Speed of DevOps.
A little-known Austrian software company is looking to snatch business from established players HP Enterprise (HPE) and IBM in the market for software testing tools, after raising $165 million from a U.S. private equity firm.
Tricentis, founded in Vienna in 2009 and now headquartered in the Silicon Valley town of Los Altos, has emerged as a leader in automating how big businesses test and deploy software, despite having raised little outside funding previously.
On Monday, the company said it will receive $165 million in financing from Insight Venture Partners, a software-focused private equity firm based in New York. Previously, Tricentis relied on "bootstrap" funding from its own operations and had taken only one outside financing round, a $9 million early-stage investment from Frankfurt-based venture firm Viewpoint, now part of Kennet Partners, in 2012.
As part its investment, Insight bought out Kennet's stake in Tricentis and is now its sole outside shareholder. Pacific Crest Securities acted as financial advisor to Tricentis, it said. The company, which counts 120 employees in Vienna, 25 in the United States and roughly another 120 employees around the world, is looking to use its new financial backing to dramatically boost its sales efforts in the U.S. market, where it employed just five sales people, CEO Sandeep Johri said.
"We can take Tricentis into becoming a global company," Johri told Reuters. "We have all the ingredients to really scale it."
The company currently counts more than 400 corporate and government customers concentrated in Central Europe, the United States, Australia and India. They include Allianz, BMW, Starbucks, Deutsche Bank, Orange, Toyota and UBS.
Tricentis ranks as the leader in software test automation by research firms Gartner and Forrester, a market where it has made inroads against established players HPE (HPE, +3.57%), IBM (IBM, +0.71%), and a variety of startups by taking a highly automated approach to testing in contrast to older script-based approaches of rivals, Johri said. Demand for Tricentis tools is being propelled by the wider shift to "agile" programming techniques where software developers at big companies rely on small, informal teams and rapid development cycles to deliver software more efficiently.
Broadly speaking, the global software testing market is estimated to generate $34 billion in 2017, according to market research firm Nelson Hall. Companies such as HPE and IBM hold big chunks of this market with software testing lines that boast broad product offerings, but also date back up to 20 years.By focusing on automating up to 90% of the work of software testing, Johri said Tricentis can take market share from more manual testing approaches of rivals, in what he says is a multi-billion-dollar slice of the software testing market.
About Tricentis
Tricentis, the Continuous Testing Company, specializes in agile market leading software testing tools for enterprises. We help Global 2000 companies adopt DevOps and gain success by achieving automation rates of over 90%. Our integrated software testing solution, Tosca Testsuite, consists of a unique Model-based Test Automation and Test Case Design approach, encompassing risk-based testing, test data management and provisioning, service virtualization, and more. We are established as a reliable enterprise partner, helping to deliver significant performance improvements to testing projects.
Prominent analysts have recognized us as a Leader in both Software Test Automation and in Functional Automation Tools, with Model-based Test Automation as our standout feature. Tricentis’ 400+ customers include global names from the Top 500 brands such as ExxonMobil, HBO, Whole Foods, Toyota, Allianz, BMW, Starbucks, Deutsche Bank, Lexmark, Orange, A&E, Vantiv, Vodafone, Telstra and UBS.
Tricentis has offices in Austria, Australia, Germany, India, Netherlands, Switzerland, Poland, United States and the UK.
About Insight Venture Parnters
Insight Venture Partners is a leading global venture capital and private equity firm investing in high-growth software, mobile and internet companies that are driving transformative change in their industries. Founded in 1995, Insight has raised more than $13 billion and invested in more than 250 companies worldwide. Our mission is to find, fund and work successfully with visionary executives providing them with practical, hands-on growth expertise to foster long-term success. For more information on Insight and all of its investments, visit http://www.insightpartners.com or follow us on Twitter: @insightpartners.
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Chipidea is a prime example of an established business that used external financing intelligently to manage a careful geographic and business line expansion plan.
In 2002, Kennet initiated a project to identify European technology companies focusing on the problem of power management. We believed that the increasing adoption of more powerful wireless devices would create high demand for power-efficient technologies at multiple levels - including batteries, semiconductor chips, and displays.
Portugal-based company Chipidea had a range of power management semiconductor Intellectual Property (IP), which it licensed to chipmakers. Although power management represented only a small part of Chipidea's business, Kennet became interested in the company for several reasons:
Kennet's Michael Elias began to develop a relationship with Jose Franca and, in mid-2004, began discussing an investment from Kennet to finance continued expansion of the business.
In May 2005, Kennet led a €12 million financing alongside co-investor Vision Capital and Portuguese Banks BCP and BPI. Michael Elias joined Chipidea's board of directors.
As with most Kennet investments, a portion of the funding was invested in the company, while the remainder was used to purchase existing shares from the company's founders. This rewarded the founders for value created in the business to date, and enabled them to feel comfortable with the risks of pushing for further growth.
Following Kennet's investment, Chipidea expanded its business considerably, building the world's largest group of analog and mixed signal engineers in a private company. In February 2007, Chipidea acquired the assets of Nordic Semiconductor's Data Converter IP Business Unit, adding a significant catalog of IP to its analog and mixed-signal portfolio. By June 2007, Chipidea had 312 employees and had operations in Portugal, Belgium, France, Poland, China, and Macau.
During the summer of 2007, Michael was instrumental in leading the board's discussions with potential acquirers that had approached the company. In August 2007, Chipidea was acquired by MIPS Technologies (NASDAQ: MIPS), for consideration of up to $153.6 million.
This acquisition was one of the two largest European semiconductor M&A exits in the past six years, and represents yet another example of a home-grown European technology company that was able to achieve global market leadership.
Cramer Systems is a great example of a capital-efficient European technology company that became a world leader in its category with judicious use of external capital. Cramer was one of the most successful private European software businesses at the time of its sale to Amdocs in August 2006 for $425 million.
In the late 1990s, founders John Craton and Don Gibson had a vision of how telecom operators could use software to better manage their networks and dramatically improve service delivery.
John and Don were a classic bootstrapped team - scrappy and opportunistic. They funded development with cash earned from consulting services and with seed capital from a number of well-connected angel investors, including David Embleton and Mark Farmer (who went on to establish Eden Ventures).
Cramer's technical team worked closely with a small number of 'beta' customers customers to fine-tune the first iteration of the product which later became Dimension.
In 1999, with initial customer deployments completed, Kennet became the first institutional investor in Cramer. Kennet's £1 million investment financed the commercialisation of Dimension in Europe.
Kennet partner David Carratt joined the board of directors and set to work with the founders on expanding the sales and marketing activities of the business. Further sales soon followed, and in October 2000, Cramer raised $25 million from Kennet and US investor BCP Capital Partners to finance expansion of the business to the US and Asia.
A critical success factor for the company was that much of the $25 million funding remained unspent. When the telecoms market entered a severe downturn in 2001, Cramer controlled its expansion carefully and retained a significant cash cushion. Cramer invested in expanding its US market presence, but it did so carefully, and-in spite of the usual setbacks during initial US market entry-relatively inexpensively.
Capital efficiency was core to Cramer's culture, and this culture secured the steady improvement in operating performance. The customer list grew to include BT, Vodafone, Bell Canada, KPN, Cable & Wireless, and Japan Telecom. Cramer's revenue increased from £1.4 million in 1999 to £52.7 million in the year ending July 2006, and the company was continuously profitable since 2003.
From the time David joined the board, he worked to help the company manage the key challenges of growth. He used his own operational experience in selling high-end software solutions, and the diverse skill set of the full Kennet team, to support the business and maximize growth.
In particular, Kennet led board-level efforts in the following areas:
Definition of market opportunity - the telecoms market is relatively narrow and market potential depends as much on product pricing as it does on landing new customers. Kennet encouraged the company to price its products based on a calculation of the value obtained by customers. This significantly increased the average sales price and thereby grew the size of Cramer's addressable market.
Professional CEO recruitment - most growing businesses need to recruit professional managers as they develop. The key to Kennet's approach is to work closely with the founders to determine when to professionalize the CEO role, and to manage the selection process on a consensus basis. David led the board's recruitment of Guy Dubois - previously head of Peoplesoft EMEA - the CEO who took Cramer to its successful exit.
Sales expansion - during the period of Kennet's investment, Cramer expanded its presence from the UK to worldwide coverage with 434 employees based around the globe. The prioritisation of investments in each geographic territory was a continual topic of board discussion. Kennet was actively involved in the development of the US market entry strategy and the selection of the equity partner to finance international expansion.
Exit planning - During the term of Kennet's investment in Cramer, David contributed a global view on exit alternatives to board discussions. In 2005 and 2006, he actively engaged in discussions with multiple prospective acquirers, and led the negotiations on behalf of the investor shareholders which culminated in the sale to Amdocs for $425 million in August 2006.