Monetate Board Additions: Steps toward IPO preparation? (Update 4/5: Monetate adds new CFO)

Tom Paine

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Conshohocken-based ecommerce software company Monetate added two new outside board members last week, both having connections to social marketing management platform ExactTarget, which was acquired by Salesforce last year for $2.5 billion.

Tim Maudlin / Monetate website

Tim Maudlin served on the Board of Directors of ExactTarget, a NASDAQ listed company prior to its acquisition by Salesforce last year, as Lead Independent Director, Chair of the Audit Committee, and Chair of the Nominating and Governance Committee. He has held similar board responsibilities for Web.com, MediaMind Technologies Inc., Fanatics, Inc. prior to its acquisition by GSI Commerce in February 2011, and Newegg. He also manages a VC firm, Medical Innovation Partners.

The other addition, Tim Kopp, served as CMO of ExactTarget prior to its acquisition by Salesforce.

Other Monetate board members are Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital (an early Monetate backer), Sam Decker (founding CMO of Bazaarvoice), Lucinda Duncalfe (Founder & CEO, Real Food Works), Adam Marcus, Managing Director of OpenView Partners (a major Monetate investor), and David Bookspan, Monetate Founder and Chairman.

These appointments don't indicate any direct relationship with Salesforce, since Kopp and
Maudlin have no current connection to the company. But they may be another step toward
preparing Monetate for an IPO, particularly given Maudlin's strong corporate governance background with public companies.

As CEO David Brussin was quoted as saying in the Daily News late last year, "in a couple of years, we'll be a public company and a lot larger."

Monetate lists ExactTarget as a "Compliant Partner", meaning its technology platform and products "natively integrate with Monetate", according to Monetate's website. In January, Monetate announced a partnership and software integration with SAP's hybris, in some regards a competitor to ExactTarget. hybris is listed by Monetate as a technology partner.

Yesterday, SAP teamed up with Adobe on a global agreement under which SAP will resell Adobe's Marketing Cloud software suite along with SAP's Hana in-memory database platform and Hybris Commerce Suite. Adobe currently does not appear among Monetate partners on its website. (Brussin cites Adobe as a Monetate competitor in the Daily News article.)

Update 4/5: This past Thursday, Monetate announced the appointment of
Bob Lawson as Chief Financial Officer. Lawson had been senior vice president and chief financial officer at RingCentral when it did its IPO last year.

"Lawson brings to Monetate proven expertise in helping pre-IPO and public companies drive organizational improvements and achieve outstanding financial results," Monetate said in a statement announcing the appointment.

Previous CFO David Stetson (see Philly Tech News profile from last year) apparently resigned at the beginning of 2014, after less than a year on the job. Around the same time, former VP of Marketing Blair Lyon (now CMO of LeadiD) left.

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LiquidHub Secures $53M Series B Capital Round Led by ChrysCapital
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SevOne to expand to larger Philly office

Tom Paine

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SevOne, the rapidly growing Wilmington-based supplier of software and appliances for large-scale, real time data network monitoring and management, announced today it is opening a larger Philadelphia satellite office at 1400 Chestnut Street. It replaces a smaller office SevOne opened just last year on Strawberry Street.

Open Layout of SevOne's new Philly office / SevOne

The new office can accomodate up to 55 employees, as opposed to 15 in the Strawberry Street location. SevOne's revenue growth, which has averaged 65% over the past three years, caused its overall headcount to double to 270 in just the past year, SevOne CEO Jack Sweeney said in a statement. In 2013, SevOne raised a $150 million round from Bain Capital.

Mayor Nutter will help SevOne celebrate the new opening with a ribbon-cutting ceremony this evening.

SevOne's expansion is a significant step toward adding to a highly skilled engineering workforce within the city. SevOne is anticipated by many to be an IPO candidate within the next few years.

“I’m excited and pleased to welcome SevOne to its new expanded offices on Chestnut Street in Center City,” said Mayor Nutter in a statement. “The continued growth of SevOne is yet another indicator of Philadelphia’s emergence as a hub for startups, technology and innovation.”

Cross Atlantic Capital Partners-backed Amber Road primed for IPO (Update)

Esther Surden
Publisher & Editor, NJTechWeekly.com


Radnor-based Cross Atlantic Capital Partners-backed Amber Road (East Rutherford, NJ), which licenses software as a service (SaaS) software to automate international import and export processes, has filed for an initial public offering (IPO). The company is expected to begin trading March 21, 2014. Cross Atlantic owns about 35%.

Amber Road, which hopes to raise $75 million, will list on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol AMBR.

The company announced its terms earlier in March. It will sell 6.5 million shares at a price range of $10.50 to $12.50 per share. According to an article on NASDAQ.com, at the midrange of this stock price Amber Road would command a fully diluted market value of $313 million.

James Preuninger of Amber Road / Courtesy Amber Road 

Amber Road was founded in 2002. According to an article on the website Seeking Alpha, Amber Road made two important acquisitions in 2005 to complete its global trade management portfolio: BridgePoint and NextLinx Corporation.

“NextLinx added 11 years of global trade compliance technology and content, which is Amber’s key selling point to customers. The company [which began as Management Dynamics] was rechristened Amber Road in 2011,” the article says.

The Seeking Alpha article notes that as of the end of 2013, Amber Road had 463 customers: 172 enterprise companies contributing at least $100,000 each in annual revenue and 291 midmarket firms contributing less than $100,000 each in annual revenue. The company employs some 500 people.

An article by Lawrence J. Aragon on Reuters PE Hub reports that Amber Road’s primary venture backers include Cross Atlantic Capital Partners, which holds 6,685,160 shares (34.8 percent of the total); Updata Partners (Washington, D.C.), 3,561,856 shares (18.6 percent); Goldman Sachs (New York), 2,987,756 shares (15.6 percent); NJTC  Venture Fund (Mount Laurel), 1,355,051 shares (7.1 percent); and Orix Ventures (Dallas), 245,946 shares (1.3 percent).

“As a group, the five investors own 14.83 million shares (or 77 percent of the total) prior to the offering. Assuming they don’t exercise options to buy additional shares, the investors collectively plan to sell about 1.2 million shares in the IPO,” the Reuters article states.

In January 2014, the NJTC’s TechNews interviewed Jim Preuninger, founder and CEO of Amber Road. Preuninger discussed some of the early challenges his company had faced, including selling a cloud product when no one else was doing so and convincing large companies like GE and Wal-Mart to buy it.

Another challenge he noted was that “one platform, a cookie-cutter approach, doesn’t work.” However, customization for each customer was unsupportable. The answer: “We had to develop a technology that was highly adaptable and had a high degree of configuration so it could be a tight-glove fit for Wal-Mart as well as a small company in a different industry,” said Preuninger.


Esther Surden is Publisher and Editor of NJTechWeekly, and a contributor to Philly Tech News. This article originally appeared in NJTechWeekly, and is republished here with her permission.

Update: Amber Road priced at $13, above the range, and now commands a $356 million market cap, Renaissance Capital reports.