The Neat Company adds new Center City Philadelphia office location, with room for up to 140 employees

Tom Paine
Follow @phillytechnews

 Subscribe in a reader
Subscribe to Philadelphia Tech News by Email

The Neat Company, which provides scanning products and services for items such as receipts and business cards, announced yesterday that it had opened a second office in Center City Philadelphia that essentially will serve as a call center for inside sales and customer service, configured for up to 140 employees. The new office is located in the Ten Penn Center building at 1801 Market Street. Neat's headquarters, located at 1601 Market Street, houses about 80 employees, and 40 are already working in the new office. Neat expects that employment at the new location will grow to exceed 100 people over the next several months. Neat moved its headquarters from West Philly to Center City last year.

The expansion reflects two factors, Neat's Chief Marketing Officer Kevin Garton told me in a phone interview. One is a strategic decision by the company is to take all sales and customer service-related functions in house, where some had previously been outsourced, and to make a long-term commitment to centralizing all its operations in the US, and in particular the city of Philadelphia. (The company does contract out manufacturing of its NeatDesk and NeatReceipts hardware products and most of that is done in China.) "While some companies decide to move sales and customer service teams offshore, we felt it was important to support local jobs and stay in Philadelphia", Garton said in a prepared statement. Neat will receive some tax credits related to job training for adding jobs in the city.

The second is the continuing growth of Neat, accelerating since the introduction of its cloud and mobile offerings (NeatCloud and NeatMobile) in July. The new products open the potential for Neat to significantly expand its customer base, and favor the use of a more direct channel with customers and prospects. Garton says Neat ran out off space long before it expected.

Garton declined to reveal how the cloud and mobile offerings were selling so far, but did say more details and additional product enhancements would be announced at CES 13 in January.

In an interview last December with the Philadelphia Business Journal, Neat CEO Jim Foster said he expected 2011 revenue to exceed $65 million, and estimated that revenue growth this year would be 40%. He also said the company had been profitable in 2010 and 2011.

Neat's principle investors have been Edison Ventures and MentorTech Ventures. It was founded in 2002 by Rafi Spero and his father, serial entrepreneur Les Spero, who are still major shareholders.



permalink