BitTitan Raises $15 Million in Outside Funding

BitTitan, which sells a broad array of tools that help partners sell, onboard and maintain cloud services from Microsoft and others, has closed a $15 million Series A financing round, which will allow the company to boost its engineering and global sales efforts.

The 9-year-old Kirkland, Wash.-based company did not disclose the specific percentage stake that the investors led by San Diego-based growth equity firm TVC Capital were getting in the company or what the deal means for the overall valuation of BitTitan.

"It is a small percentage of the company, and we are adding one person to our board," said Barney Silver, vice president of finance for BitTitan, in a telephone interview about the funding round, which was announced Thursday. Steve Hamerslag, managing partner at TVC Capital, is the investor joining the board. In a statement, Hamerslag said BitTitan was TVC Capital's largest Series A funding to date. Tao Capital Partners of San Francisco also participated in the funding round.

This is the first outside funding BitTitan has taken since former Microsoft engineer Geeman Yip started the company in 2007, and Silver says the company's bootstrap identity and the fact that it is already profitable were major factors in BitTitan's ability to raise money even as the trend among technology investors is for them to fold their wallets shut.

"Being a business that's been around for a while and that has demonstrated that we weren't trying to figure out if we've got a product that works or not was super helpful to us," Silver said.

According to senior BitTitan executives, Yip determined that the opportunity in cloud generally was becoming bigger than BitTitan could continue to address in the organic-growth manner that it had previously operated. That was part of the reason for bringing Silver onboard late last year.

Silver said he's not sure that BitTitan will need future outside investments. "We are raising this money so we can accelerate growth. This may be all the money we ever need to raise," Silver said. "We met with lots of investors who were very interested to write us significantly bigger checks. Realistically, we couldn't deploy $50 or $60 million today. It would be too much to spend relative to our scale too quickly."

The growth of the company to date has been rapid. The company claims revenue increases between 50 percent to 100 percent in each of the last five years. A major push behind BitTitan's relatively new MSPComplete offerings has helped the company double its number of partners in the last year to more than 7,000 MSPs, systems integrators and distributors.

BitTitan, which has also doubled its staff in the last couple of years, will be hiring aggressively with the investment. "We've cashed the check and we are in the process of opening dozens of headcount as we speak," said Rocco Seyboth, vice president of products and marketing for BitTitan. "The two areas we are focusing on and how we're going to deploy the capital is accelerating the product roadmap -- hiring more engineers so we can build out software more quickly -- and the other is international expansion. While we are a global business, and we have sales around the world, we were doing it with a few people scattered around the globe."

Posted by Scott Bekker on June 09, 2016