Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

Ordway, a Washington, DC startup, is building a platform to deal with all of the stuff that happens after you make sale. It starts with the order and goes all the way to revenue as a one-time payment or recurring subscription. Today the company announced a $10 million Series A.

CRV led the round with participation from Clocktower Ventures and existing investors Lerer Hippeau and Revolution Rise of the Rest fund. The company has now raised a total of $12.5 million, according to Crunchbase data.

Sameer Gulati, founder and CEO at Ordway, says the company wanted to build a flexible tool to sit between the CRM and financial systems of a company. “So in that sense, we do everything for post-sales from billing automation, payment collection, revenue recognition, analytics, all the way to cash. We have a streamlined workflow for managing order to revenue,” Gulati told TechCrunch.

It sounds a lot like the Quote-to-Cash space where companies like Apttus (acquired by Thoma Bravo in 2018) or SteelBrick (acquired by Salesforce in 2015) tried to stake a claim, but Gulati says while his company’s solution handles the quote-to-cash workflow, it can do much more than that.

“We absolutely can handle the workflow from quote to billing to payments to revenue, for sure. But the reason Ordway has a niche is because we are a lot more configurable and a lot more flexible to accommodate any workflow out there,” he said.

He says his company’s solution connects to the CRM system on one side and the financial systems on the other. They are compatible with all the major CRM tools including Salesforce and Dynamics 365. And they support a range of financial tools like NetSuite or QuickBooks.

“In fact, we can work with any back-end small system to a large scale ERP system, but our value add is automating the movement of data into the ERP. So we are the operational framework between sales and traditional ERP. We will handle everything in between,” he said.

As for the funding, Gulati has the kind of plans you would expect with a Series A investment. “The core goal is definitely to accelerate all aspects of our business from sales and marketing to product and engineering, and most importantly, customer success. Basically, in a sense we are doubling down on making sure our customers are successful in solving their core sales to finance business challenges,” he said.

The company launched in 2018 and has 25 employees today. Gulati says his company’s goal is to grow 4x in the next 12 months and grow employees at a similar rate.

Apttus, a quote-to-cash vendor built on top of the Salesforce platform that looked to be heading toward an IPO in recent years has taken a different tack, instead being acquired by private equity firm Thoma Bravo today.

The company did not reveal the purchase price, but said it could be ready to share more details about the arrangement after the deal closes, probably next month. “What we can say is that Apttus views this development positively and believes Thoma Bravo can instill greater operational excellence, strengthen our market leadership and allow us to continue providing indispensable value to our customers,” a company spokesperson told TechCrunch.

They are describing this not as a full on acquisition, but as ‘taking a majority stake’. However you describe it, it probably wasn’t the ending the company envisioned after taking $404 million in investment since launching in 2006, one of the earliest startups to build a business on top of the Salesforce platform.

If the company believed that Salesforce would eventually buy it, that never happened. In fact, that dream probably went out the window when Salesforce bought SteelBrick, a similar company also built on Salesforce, at the end of 2015 for $360 million.

In spite of this, in an interview in 2016, CEO Kirk Krappe still was confident that an exit was coming, either by IPO or a possibly a Salesforce acquisition.

“We will be IPOing this year. That may be a function to figure what Salesforce wants to do and they may think about that [after purchasing SteelBrick at the end of last year]. There’s no reason they can’t buy us too. For me, I have to run the business, and we’re growing 100 percent year on year. If Salesforce came to the table, that would be great if the numbers work. If not, we have an amazingly strong business,” he said at the time.

That never came to pass of course, and the company tried to separate itself from Salesforce in April of 2016 when it released a version of Apttus that would work on Microsoft Dynamics. Krappe saw this as a way to show investors he wasn’t completely married to the Salesforce platform.

While Salesforce provided a system of record around the customer information and all that involved, once the salesperson actually closed in on a sale, that’s when software like Apttus came into play, allowing the company to generate a detailed proposal, a contract once the deal was agreed upon and finally collecting and recording the money from the sale.

Apttus took its last funding rounds in Sept 2017 for $55 million and later a debt financing round for another $75 million in February this year, according to data on Crunchbase.

Thoma Bravo has bought a number of enterprise software products over the years including Qlik, Sailpoint, Dynatrace, Solar Winds and others. Apttus should fit in well with that family of companies.

 It seems AI and machine learning are quickly becoming a must-have for today’s software. Apttus, the quote-to-cash service is putting AI to work in contract processing in an effort to speed up a highly inefficient system and close sales faster. Contracts have traditionally been a bottleneck in the sales process. As Apttus CEO and company founder Kirk Krappe explains it, there are a series… Read More

 Apttus, the unicorn quote-to-cash vendor built on the Salesforce platform, announced a $55 million round, which is likely its final private investment on the way to an IPO. While CEO Kirk Krappe wouldn’t definitively confirm the company was going public, he did say that today’s round was about gaining the confidence of future investors. “We decided we needed a certain amount… Read More

 Microsoft has been searching for ways to strengthen its flagging Dynamics customer relationship management (CRM) tool, and it made a couple of moves this week (one quite significant) with an eye toward making life easier for sales people and enhancing its marketshare in the process. For starters, you might have heard that Microsoft bought LinkedIn on Monday for a cool $26 billion.… Read More

 Since its earliest days Apttus has always been a Salesforce shop. It’s built on the Salesforce platform and worked exclusively with Salesforce CRM, but that changed today when the company announced it would also be supporting Microsoft Dynamics in the future.
There seemed to be a shift in the company’s thinking at the end of last year when Salesforce bought SteelBrick, a fellow… Read More

 When Salesforce announced it was buying quote-to-cash vendor SteelBrick for $360 million at the end of last year, it came as a surprise. CEO Marc Benioff offered some insight into why he made the purchase at today’s Salesforce Lightning CRM launch event.
The move has to be seen in the context of comments made at a Dreamforce press event last fall with Keith Block, who was named COO today. Read More

 In a frank conversation with TechCrunch last week, Apttus CEO Kirk Krappe talked about his company’s exit strategy, which could come to a head in the not-too-distant future. Krappe believes his company is in a good position to IPO or sell — possibly to Salesforce if it’s interested — some time later this year. “We will be IPOing this year. That may be a… Read More

 SteelBrick, the company that provides configure, price and quote (CPQ) software built on top of Salesforce.com’s Salesforce 1 platform, announced today that it was buying Invoice IT, an online billing company based in England. The terms were unavailable, but it was heavily weighted toward equity over cash, according SteelBrick CEO Godard Abel. Both parties are betting on a joint company,… Read More

 Just a couple of years ago Apttus, a quote-to-cash SaaS company built on top of Salesforce.com, had a couple of hundred employees. Today it has 900 and projects more than 1,000 by the end of the year. And it’s not hiring all of those bodies for nothing. The company’s year-over-year growth is in the 60 percent range. While not willing to provide an exact figure, it claims to have… Read More