Bain Capital invests $150 million in Wilmington-based SevOne

Tom Paine

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I thought Wilmington-based SevOne might be on to something big. It is.

Today the network performance monitoring company announced it was receiving a $150 million investment from Bain Capital, following a year in which SevOne said "bookings doubled year over year, profitability increased significantly and our customer base doubled."

SevOne is one of those companies that may have invented the proverbial "better box". In a world increasingly dependent on big data, distributed networks and cloud computing, the company's "SevOne Cluster" architecture helps customers monitor network performance at a detailed level on a dynamic, real time basis. SevOne's IT Performance Appliances scale to the size of any network, and its peer-to-peer architecture means that each node in the network can communicate with the other nodes. Comcast was an early and important SevOne customer.

SevOne CEO Mike Phelan

“We want to pursue the public markets,” CEO Mike Phelan told TechCrunch, presumably meaning the company is looking towards an IPO. He said that SevOne plans to use the funds to expand internationally, into the Goverment market and also to reach more middle market customers. Most of its early customers have been very large.

SevOne was founded in 2005 and currently has about 140 employees, but "will scale to several hundred by the end of the year," Phelan told TechCrunch.

SevOne has only raised a reported $3.5 million prior to this round. Osage Ventures has been the only institutional investor, leading a Series A in 2007 and a subsequent round in 2009. Other investors include a private group led by CEO Phelan, who prior to co-founding SevOne founded StorNet, which he built into a leading national storage consulting firm; Jonathan Brassington, the CEO and Founding Partner of Liquid Hub; and John Ryan, founder of SunGard Data Systems and a private investor.

I had SevOne ranked 4th among Philly Tech News' "Young Companies To Watch", but will probably move it up a few notches based on this. I would guess early investors received a good valuation since they got to this point with so little capital invested. Its a huge win for Delaware, assuming they stay there.




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