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Spring 2009 | Commonwealth Capital Ventures Newsletter
Greetings!
Thank you for taking the time to read this issue of the Commonwealth Capital Ventures Newsletter. The last few months were active ones for us as we made new investments in Tungle and Jaz'd Markets and our existing portfolio continued to make progress with new products, customers, partnerships.
Looking forward, we see plenty of growth opportunities for companies selling lower-cost offerings that provide fast and measurable ROI for their customers. In fact, the current environment may actually provide an opening for these companies as potential customers redeploy spending from "nice-to-have" offerings to "need-to-have" ones that require little upfront investment.
If you have a company or an idea that you believe is poised for long-term success, we invite you to come in and talk with us about it to see if we can be a good partner as your grow your business.
All the best,
The Commonwealth Capital Ventures Team
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New Investments
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 Jaz'd Markets: Commonwealth jointly led an $8M Series A round of funding for Jaz'd Markets, a provider of online directory driven Marketing as a Service (MaaS) to buyers and sellers of business to business products. Based in Andover, MA, Jaz'd combines B2B directory placement, contextual display advertising, lead generation, and social media marketing into an innovative Marketing as a Service (MaaS) platform where advertisers generate real value from their online marketing spend. Pilot House Ventures co-lead the funding round. Mike Fitzgerald has joined Jaz'd's board of directors.
Click Here for the Press Release
 Tungle:
Commonwealth led a $5M Series A round of funding for Tungle, a Montreal, Canada-based provider of online scheduling that allows customers to securely and dynamically share their free/busy calendar across company boundaries with any other Tungle user. It is the first product to work with Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple iCal, and Entourage for Mac. JLA Ventures and Desjardins Venture Capital also participated in the round. Jeffrey Hurst has joined the board of directors.
Click Here for the Press Release
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| Portfolio Company News |
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 Antenna's Mobility Platform™ (AMP) was part of AT&T Mobility's announcement of its Enterprise Mobility offering. AMP provides the support that enables AT&T to extend an array of applications to mobile devices that are used by companies in targeted vertical industries. Antenna will work with AT&T to help organizations embrace mobility solutions for real-time data interaction and collaboration. Antenna also demonstrated its next-generation mobility platform (AMP 2.0) at Oracle OpenWorld 2008 in San Francisco and is one of Oracle's Elite 8 group of top-tier partners that represent best-in-class solutions and customer success with Oracle CRM On-Demand.
 Constant Contact
won the award for Company of the Year given by The Mass Technology Leadership Council at its awards gala held at the Boston Sheraton Hotel. The awards honor businesses, technology innovators, and leaders involved in driving technology in Massachusetts.
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 Copanion announced a partnership with Intuit Inc. to use Copanion's GruntWorx tax document scanning, sorting, and organizing software to power Intuit's new Document eSort offering. This new product will integrate seamlessly with Intuit's existing tax software and bring GruntWorx's productivity increasing capabilities to a wider base of tax preparation firm customers. |
 First Coverage announced the release of The Community, Version 3.0 of its web-based platform that includes an alpha capture system, media sentiment engine, and meeting management tool. The new product consolidates and analyzes traditionally unstructured information, including trade ideas, news articles, industry blogs and research reports, to efficiently connect buy-side investment professionals with the people and data most likely to add value to their investment processes.
 Innoveer
received a "Ones to Watch" award from CRM magazine. Announced during the 2008 CRM Market Awards and destination CRM 2008 conference, the awards honored the vendors, consultants, and end-user companies focused on creating and cultivating rewarding customer experiences and relationships through the sophisticated integration of people, processes, and technologies.
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 Reval announced HedgeRx® Version 8.1, the latest upgrade of its HedgeRX product. The new upgrade continues Reval's breadth of coverage across multi-asset classes and its place at the forefront of hedge accounting with the addition of a new Structured Interest Rate and Credit modules and expanded compliance reporting for IFRS 7, FAS 161 and FAS 157. Reval also continued to win industry awards, including its third consecutive "Best Technology Provider for Hedge Accounting Solutions" award from Treasury Management International.
 Zeemote appointed Ernie Cormier as CEO and President. He joined Zeemote from Virgin Media where he led that firm's consumer division. Before Virgin Media, he served as Vice President of Product Development at Nextel Communications. Ernie joins Zeemote at a time of considerable momentum after the company signed up its first two handset partners, Nokia Corp. and Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB, for exclusive distribution deals in Germany and the Netherlands, respectively.
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Partner Viewpoints
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Commonwealth partners weighed in on a variety of issues in interviews and bylined and staff-written articles in a number of industry publications. Mike Fitzgerald talked about the downturn in a Meet the Manager interview with PrivateEquityCentral.net. Jeff Hurst authored an article for the Boston Business Journal on SaaS investments and Justin Perreault penned an article on SaaS selling models for AlwaysOn.
Meet the Manager, an Interview with Mike Fitzgerald
PrivateEquityCentral.net: How has the state of the economy affected you?
Mike Fitzgerald: Our businesses are under a lot of pressure as you might guess. Back in Q3 of last year we had a big deal blow up because a Fortune 500 company gagged at all the cash going out the door, because they were rolling over a lot of commercial paper.
Click Here to Log Into PrivateEquityCentral.net
SaaS Models That Address Risk Gain Investor Interest
By Jeff Hurst
Today, financial markets represent a huge global opportunity for new companies with technologies addressing the challenges involved in reducing risk, raising returns, and optimizing data. These fast moving, rapidly changing markets have capital to spend and customers willing to quickly adopt new technologies that can help them maintain a competitive edge. Increasingly, financial technologies based on software as a service (SaaS) models are showing great potential to address these needs, and are becoming attractive investments for institutional investors.
Read Full Text of the Article
Old Ways, New Needs
By Justin Perreault
As more and more enterprises move to Software as a Service for the applications they need, the way SaaS companies sell now is becoming as important as what they sell. In today's enterprise market, many SaaS companies still are using traditional approaches that rely heavily on direct salespeople. These approaches are expensive, cumbersome, and simply do not suit the way customers want to buy now. SaaS companies have a good opportunity to succeed, even in today's tough economy, but to do so, they must evolve away from strictly traditional sales models and toward hybrid selling methods that combine the best points of the old ways with new Internet marketing and sales techniques.
Read Full Text of the Article
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Contact Information:
Commonwealth Capital Ventures
Bay Colony Corporate Ctr.
950 Winter Street
Suite 4100
Waltham, MA 02451 | | |
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| Commonwealth Capital Ventures is a leading venture capital firm focused on software & services, Internet & digital media, communications & wireless, and instruments & systems investments. Since its inception in 1995, the firm has invested in roughly 140 high-growth companies. Commonwealth currently manages more than $580 million of committed capital across four funds. To learn more about our team, click here. | |
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General Partners
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