By Allan Maurer
VIENNA, VA—Parature, a company selling online customer support software, has raised $16 million in Series B funding led by Accel Partners, joined by previous investors, Sierra Ventures and Valhalla Partners, according to Private Equity Hub.
Founded in 2000, Virginia-based Parature has raised a total of about $28 million.
The company doubled its size last year, going from 40 to 80 employees and opening a San Francisco office.
The company’s software evolved from live chat software the founders developed while still in school at Cornell University.
Duke Chung, CEO of Parature, told TechJournal South last year that the company had “good timing.”
Most online customer support software is more expensive and complex than many small to mid-sized businesses can afford or handle, he explained. But with new businesses of all sizes going online daily, there was a ready market for Parature’s less expensive, easy-to-deploy product. The company has more than 450 clients and serves more than six million users at companies.
Customers include The Weather Channel, AMD, Office Depot, and Florida State University, but also many smaller and mid-sized clients. Parature has a 98 percent renewal rate, outstanding for software as a service, which averages 68 percent. “Some of our customers say, ‘You can never take away our Parature,’” Chung noted.
Chung added that the company’s major competitors, such as Texas-based BMC software, which has 15,000 customers and $1.49 billion in revenues, “have historically focused on much larger customers.”
“Larger companies like Amazon have the resources to build these resources themselves,” he said, “But there are a lot of companies that want to focus on their own business and outsource customer support to companies like Parature.”
Chung is recognized as one of the top up and coming entrepreneurs in the Northern Virginia region. In 2002, Washington Techway magazine named him as one of the area’s top under-30 technology executives. He was selected to the 2002 MindShare Class, an exclusive, by-invitation-only program for CEOs of the most promising, high tech, start-up companies in the Greater Washington Metropolitan region.
His company has been recognized as one of the best places to work bin 2005 and 2006 by the Washington Business Journal.
Previously on TechJournal South:
Parature Growing 100 percent a year
http://techjournalsouth.com/news/article.html?item_id=2684
On the Web: www.parature.com
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