I had a chance this morning to catch up with the Jive team and learn some background details on their announcement this evening of closing a new round of funding yesterday. The $30M round was led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers (KPCB), a new addition to the Jive family and included previous investor Sequoia Capital. The $30M brings Jive's total funding to $57M. As a part of the round KPCB managing partner Ted Schlein will join Jive's board. These two firms are certainly top shelf VC's and it's always encouraging when the round includes a previous investor. If memory serves these two firms haven't done a join deal in a while, and the one joint funding deal that stands out was in 1999 when the two VC's funded a growing start up by the name of Google to the tune of $25M, which bought the two firms a 20% stake in a company that has a market cap today of $153.31B.
I recently posted a look at Jive's current strategy and recent announcements so I won't rehash that post today. Instead let's focus on what Jive plans to do with the new funding. Jive is in a solid position in the emerging social business software market and the new $ will help them drive visibility and awareness for the company and the social business market itself. Many of the Fortune 5000 companies are starting to look at social software and social business initiatives so now is the time for the leaders in this market to push hard. The funding will help Jive expand it's marketing efforts, direct sales force, partnerships and perhaps more importantly, start to develop an indirect sales channel. The indirect channel is critical for accelerating growth, international reach and to reach companies in the mid-market.
Jive, with over 3000 current customers that include names like Intel, Nike, SAP, Avon, Netflix, RJ Reynolds, JPMorganChase, Shell, Honeywell and Yale University, has seen rapid growth over the last year, even in the down economy. With several new partnerships with ISV's, SI's and VAR's the company is starting to build an ecosystem and leverage the successful business model of an add-on application marketplace. CEO Tony Zingale has hinted that the company plans an IPO within the next 12 months. Zingale, a Mercury Interactive veteran, has built a strong management team, several of whom he has worked with before at Mercury, and has positioned the company very effectively to leverage the rapidly expanding market for social software solutions.
Tags: social business, jive software, social web, software, enterprise, VC, funding
