Customer Relations Management

Tomorrow morning we will announce that we've raised another $15 million to help Intacct to grow our business. This is on top of $14 million we raised in June 2007 and raises the total amount invested in Intacct since its founding to just more than $80 million. We're already profitable from operations, and we were far ahead of our business plan, so this raise is really all about having the capital to expand the business faster and build out our product lines.

I'm also delighted that Byron Deeter from Bessemer Venture Partners will be joining the Intacct family. Bessemer is a great investor and I've had the pleasure to work with them twice before, first at Trigo and then at Postini. They are the leading late stage SaaS investor, and are doing a ton of thought leadership work around how to build and scale SaaS businesses. Byron is an ex-McKinsey type who went on to be a business development and deal-making stud before going to VC route.

$29 million raised in a nine month period puts Intacct among the top most funded software companies in the last year.

What the investors see is that Intacct is set to be a disruptive player in a very large ($7 billion per year) mature market for SMB business applications that is largely going to go SaaS. Intacct is insulated from competition in that it takes something like an $80 million investment and years of work to build world-class on-demand financial applications that really work - in the traditional on-premises software market there are more than 50 companies, but in the on-demand market there are really only two, Intacct and NetSuite, or three if you count Intuit with QuickBooks on-line.

The investors also see that Intacct is differentiated by our open, best of breed approach and a channel and partner friendly business strategy. Our CEO Mike Braun has also done a great job bulding out a solid and experienced management team with fabulous track record.

So if it sounds like I am excited I am - the best time to raise money is when you really don't need it - and to be able to add Bessemer to our already world class SaaS investors at Sigma Partners, Sutter Hill Ventures and Emergence Capital is a great thing. I'm looking forward to great things over the next years here at Intacct.