Zuora Raises $36 Million to Push into Europe
November 16, 2011
On-demand subscription billing and payment house Zuora is expanding its multi-tenant cloud into Europe on the back of a $36 million D round led by Index Ventures. Greylock Partners and Workday co-CEO Dave Duffield, who started PeopleSoft, are also kicking in…
The infusion brings Zuora’s total funding to $82.5 million.
Existing investors include Benchmark Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Tenaya Capital and salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff.
Despite the economic turmoil over there Zuora says there’s demand in Europe for pay-as-you-go subscription-based services in telecoms, media, technology, consumer services, high-tech and other industries.
Early this year Zuora opened an EMEA headquarters in London. After nine months of operations, it has 30-odd customers, including larger enterprises such as News International, Reed Business Information, Touring Club Suisse and VNU Media, as well as a bunch of high-growth start-ups. It says its new EMEA business translates into €2 billion ($2.7 billion) in contracted subscription revenue.
Figuring it’s on to something it means to expand its presence across the Nordic countries, Benelux, Germany and France under general manager Paul Averill supported by offices in London and Utrecht.
Averill has worked the region before for EMC, Oracle, StorageTek, Openwave and Cloudmark.
Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo claims "the shift to a subscription economy business model is as big as the shift to an industrial economy one hundred years ago. Traditional ERP systems like Oracle and SAP were built for manufacturing, not subscription services. Every business in the subscription economy must adopt new platforms."