Irish software start-up looking to raise €600,000

CloudKPI, a female-led, Co Wicklow-headquartered software start-up, is looking to raise €600,000 to take total fundraising to date to €1 million as it gears up for expansion in the US.

The move comes as the company's co-founders, Maeve Kneafsey and Brenda Jordan, have been selected to participate in a prestigious year-long accelerator programme in Silicon Valley.

CloudKPI, which recently raised €400,000 from Enterprise Ireland and private investors, is an analytics platform for scaling software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies. Its reporting and predictive forecasting tools enable firms to switch from simply gathering metrics to forecasting and managing growth.

With Gartner forecasting that 80 per cent of software will be subscription-based by 2020, the company is tapping into a market that is expected to be worth $180 billion.

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“We reckon that companies at the moment are leaving millions on the table because of the lag time it takes them to get information themselves from the various systems they have,” said Ms Kneafsey, CloudKPI’s chief executive.

“We have a proposition that satisfies a problem experienced by all SaaS companies, which is concentrating on delivering predictive insights that show them what’s going on with their business. Such firms have to scale fast because of the nature of the model, and so they need quick access to information that allow them to make decisions. Effectively, we do all the heavy lifting for them in terms of gathering metrics,” she added.

Digital metrics

Ms Kneafsey is an expert in digital metrics, online revenues and marketing strategy. Well known in Irish tech circles, she is a former chair of the Irish Internet Association (IIA). As well as previously founding two companies, Marketfinder and Elucidate, she also co-founded the Ireland eGovernment Awards and Amas, Ireland's first dedicated digital strategy agency.

Her cofounder Brenda Jordan, meanwhile, was formerly managing director at Accounting for Growth.

CloudKPI was recently selected to participate in the Women’s Startup Lab, a founder accelerator programme based in Menlo Park, California, which commences later this month. The company is one of nine start-ups picked from hundreds of applicants to take part in the accelerator.

“There is a huge appetite for investing in women-led technology companies because they are performing so well. However, the system doesn’t work in a way that makes it easy for them to get investment, so the incubator is aimed at introducing you to investors and accelerating your growth by giving you access to customers,” said Ms Kneafsey.

Past participants of the programme include Cognea AI, which was acquired by IBM for an undisclosed sum in May 2014, and the internet radio service Playlist, which has raised $25 million to date. Among those advising the participants during the year will be Evernote co-founder and former chief executive Phil Libin and Match. com co-founder Fran Maier.

“Our concentration currently is on getting the product market fit right to make sure that what we have built matches what customers need,” said Ms Kneafsey. “We will be working over the next while with around 10 companies intensively to really see how they use our platform to see what tweaks we can make to make the product even more useful to customers.”