According to the rules of the New Austerity, companies get points these days just for raising financing. And like double coupons, they get double points for persuading chic hard-nosed investors to part with their money.
Aria Systems just came home with the chicest VC there is – Venrock, the Rockefeller concern that pretty much invented venture capital and funded Intel, Apple and the Google-acquired DoubleClick when they were start-ups.
In the name-dropping contest, the biggest name that Aria rival Zuora can drop is Salesforce.com founder and ex-Oracle lieutenant Marc Benioff, who was in short pants when Venrock started writing checks.
Benioff anted up some seed capital for Zuora.
What Aria and Zuora do is on-demand billing.
Aria also does customer lifecycle management and it just got a $10 million B round from Venrock.
It says it valuation this time through was double its A round last year.
It initial investors included Hummer Winblad and Dave Labuda, the Half Moon Bay restaurateur who used to be Oracle’s CFO then went and started Portal Software and sold it to Oracle for $220 million two years ago. Founded in the days when the Internet was new, Portal focused on billing when nobody knew how to do it on the web.
Anyway, Aria wanted the Venrock money to accelerate the development of its A+ Billing Platform, an enterprise-class billing platform offered as a flexible Software-as-a Service (SaaS).
Aria, which says it was almost profitable before its first round, has managed over a million accounts (figure going on two billion transactions) over the past five years.
It converts complex legacy billing systems to subscription management for large enterprises while overseeing subscriptions and reporting for smaller companies. Aria does a lot of the fulfillment for its accounts.
CEO Ed Sullivan says the company takes a holistic approach to managing subscription-based billing – recognizing that the customer experience begins before and continues after payment collection and really embraces the whole lifecycle of a customer’s experience with a company.
For instance, Aria defines billing as customer acquisition, service acquisition, usage tracking, invoicing (calculation, presentment, collection, remittance and reconciliation), customer management and reporting.
In September, it announced a record third quarter that saw sales bookings double sequentially and quadruple from the first quarter. It claims an “enormous uptick” since September.
About Maureen O'Gara Maureen O'Gara the most read technology reporter for the past 20 years, is the Cloud Computing and Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected technology reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025.
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According to the rules of the New Austerity, companies get points these days just for raising financing. And like double coupons, they get double points for persuading chic hard-nosed investors to part with their money.
