Boston-based OpenView Venture Partners invades Philly; Backs Monetate, and now NextDocs

Upon reading this morning that the $10.3 million investement in King of Prussia-based life sciences compliance software vendor NextDocs was funded by Boston-based OpenView Venture Partners, I realized that I had heard that name before recently - in connection with another Philly area deal.

It was Monetate, in which OpenView led a $15 million round, which was announced on August 4.

I asked OpenView partner Firas Raouf in a phone conversation whether there was any connection to this geographical proximity, given that OpenView has no other Philadelphia presence in its portfolio that I can see, or whether it was mere coincidence. He said it was just a coincidence. OpenView, he says, focuses on providing expansion funding to emerging best of breed software companies worldwide (as long as they have some US operations), and doesn't have an East Coast orientation or mid-Atlantic strategy. While he managed the NextDocs deal, OpenView managing director Adam Marcus oversaw the Monetate deal, just a few miles away.

He said he had been speaking with NextDocs co-founder and CEO Zikria Syed for a couple of years, though Syed did not want to get funding too soon (and Raouf did not think NextDocs needed it yet). Syed got the business off the ground to where it is today almost entirely through bootstrapping, with no outside institutional investment.

Raouf says NextDocs can expand in several ways; by growing its customer base in the US ( NextDocs often replaces outdated legacy systems used for regulatory compliance), internationally, and also by moving into clinical trial management systems.

Raouf will join NextDocs' board. OpenView, which has $240 million under management, was the sole participant in this round, he says.