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Zuora raises $6.5 Mn in Series A funding

si Team
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
si Team
K.V. Rao co-founded Zuora, the California based provider of SaaS services for subscription management and billing received a $ 6.5 million funding in the Series A round. Led by Benchmark Capital, investors include founders from Salesforce.com and WebEx. Zuora plans to use the funds to successfully deploy its next generation platform, to further drive product development, and to expand sales and marketing programs. “Today, venture capitalists see the trend shifting towards a subscription services world,“ says Rao.

Headquartered in Redwood City, Zuora has created an on-demand platform designed to simplify the process of online purchase of subscription services including billing and provisioning. It replaces the cumbersome manual processes and the expensive billing systems currently employed with a hosted solution and delivers the flexibility and simplicity needed to conduct seamless, ongoing customer transactions.

Rao strongly believes that there would be a subscription transformation across many industries. “Managing subscription services is hard, and our platform handles all of the complexities of usage based, pay-as-you-go subscription pricing so that customers can focus on their core product, services, and their customers,” says Rao.

Three SaaS industry veterans founded Zuora in 2007 — Tien Tzuo, K.V. Rao and Cheng Zou. Tzuo is Zuora’s CEO, Rao is President, and Zou is Chief Technology Officer. Having 21 employees currently on the roll, Zuora plans to expand its team in all operations.

“After spending nine years at Salesforce.com evangelizing the SaaS model, it became clear to me that not only software but entire industries will move to a pay-as-you-go model,” said Tzuo. “Our vision is to create a new platform for subscription businesses, analogous to the way PayPal developed automated online payments, and Benchmark Capital is the ideal strategic partner to help us get there.”

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