Funds will be used to expand sales, engineering, and delivery capacity, open new offices and enhance Aravo SIM 10 product offerings
SAN FRANCISCO, CA, December 8, 2008 – Aravo Solutions, Inc., the leading provider of on-demand Supplier Information Management (SIM) software and services, today announced that it has closed $7 million in Series D funding. The funds will be used to expand sales, engineering, and delivery capacity, to open new offices in the US and India, and to fuel further enhancement of Aravo’s sustainability and risk management products. The firm also plans to hold a second close on the Series D round in 2009 to accommodate continued investor interest.
Aravo has raised $30 million in total funding to date, almost exclusively from individual investors, with the majority of the firm’s Series A, B, and C investors participating in the Series D round. The round was lead by Charles Schwab/Big Sky Partners, who made their fourth investment in the company. Other investors in the round included Stephen Friedman (Retired Chairman, Goldman Sachs) Tony Mayer (Former CEO, JP Morgan Capital), and a syndicate of senior partners and C-level executives from Goldman Sachs.
“Given the current economic climate, Aravo is extremely pleased to announce our successful Series D financing,” said Tim Albinson, CEO of Aravo. “We are fortunate to be in the enterprise cost reduction business with a laser-focus on saving money for Fortune 500 firms such as GE. This new funding will allow us to make critical investments to increase capacity and meet the strong demand we’re seeing for our service.”
“Aravo’s management team has shown a remarkable ability to grow their business despite a series of systemic economic shocks, including the dot-com bust, 9/11, and now the current housing and credit crisis” said Aravo investor and Board Member Fredric Steck, a former Goldman Sachs partner and current Advisory Director at the firm. “The firm has more than doubled in the last twelve months on revenue, headcount and clients, and 2009 looks to be an even stronger year.”
Aravo: Powering the world’s largest SaaS deployment at GE
Last month Aravo announced a global deployment with GE that represents the world’s largest single software-as-a-service deployment. “We evaluated a number of alternatives for managing our suppliers and their information, but Aravo SIM was the best commercially-available solution capable of meeting our complex, global needs,” said Gary Reiner, Senior Vice President and CIO of GE. “We are now managing over 500,000 suppliers and their data in Aravo, and have just gone live in six languages with suppliers around the world. We expect our use of Aravo to drive significant cost savings, while improving data accuracy, compliance and productivity.”
Aravo SIM is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform that allows global enterprises to significantly reduce costs associated with supplier information-related business processes. Aravo SIM automates the entire supplier information management lifecycle, helping companies quickly and accurately onramp and manage vast amounts of complex supplier data across multiple geographies, categories and business units. The product offers role-based dashboards to give all supply chain partners instant access to accurate information in real time, delivering a single source of supplier truth that supports collaboration and automation. Using Aravo SIM companies improve data quality and compliance, improve efficiencies, and transform supplier information into a valuable asset that can be leveraged throughout the organization.
About Aravo
The world’s best-run businesses utilize Aravo’s Cloud-based Supplier Lifecycle Management solutions and Supplier Risk Services to find and manage trading partner relationships, reduce supply chain risk, ensure global regulatory compliance and lower the cost of managing suppliers by up to 72%. Aravo launched the market’s first SIM/SLM solution in 2004 and has been the leading innovator in the space ever since. Customers such as General Electric, Accenture, and Boston University rely on Aravo to manage information and processes for over 2 million global suppliers. Aravo is based in San Francisco, with offices in Chicago, Dallas, New York, Portland, Monterrey, Mexico and Ahmedabad, India, and is backed by over $50 million in investment from Cisco Systems, Big Sky Partners, and others.
