California-based Cloud Pharma CRM & CMS vendor Veeva Systems, with sales & marketing based in Radnor, may seek IPO
Tom Paine
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Veeva Systems, a Pleasonton, CA-based cloud CRM and CMS vendor that has rapidly emerged as a leader in serving the pharmaceutical industry, may be considering an IPO, according to a Bloomberg report.
Veeva has its US sales, marketing and customer service functions based in Radnor and has about 50 to 60 employees in the Philly area, said Veeva co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Matt Wallach, a Wallingford native who is based here, in a telephone interview with Philly Tech News today.
Veeva's CRM solution, which competes against Oracle (Siebel) and Cegedim (formerly Cegedim Dendrite), runs on top of Salesforce.com's Force.com platform. Veeva built its own CMS solution, Vault, which competes with EMC's Documentem offering, from scratch, Wallach says. While Vault is still a relatively small portion of its business, it is growing very rapidly.
Veeva's success might be considered somewhat analogous to that of Workday's, which was founded by PeopleSoft founders whose company was acquired by Oracle. Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri left Oracle to start Workday, which provides cloud solutions for Human Reources Management (HRM) and Financials, when Oracle and SAP were slow to respond to the trend towards cloud computing. Likewise, Veeva's founders, Wallach and CEO Peter Gassner, were formerly with Siebel and PeopleSoft respectively, and left after those companies were acquired by Oracle.
Veeva posted a profit in 2012 of $30 million on sales of $120 million, according to sources cited by Bloomberg. Wallach says because of Veeva's vertical focus it has been able to limit its sales & marketing expenses as a percentage of sales, as opposed to companies like Salesforce and Workday addressing broader markets. The company, which was founded in 2007, has accomplished this with an outside investment of only $7 million, $4 million in institutional VC money from Emergence Capital Partners and $3 million in angel funds.
Bloomberg cited sources as saying the company was seeking an IPO valuation of up to $2 billion. Wallach, while not denying that an IPO was a future possibility, said that Veeva had not taken any steps towards that other than presenting at an investment banker's conference, and that a $2 billion valuation reflected someone else's speculation, not the company's or any one connected with it. Veeva is interested in exploring how much it might be worth, though, he said.
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