Tidemark Bulks Up With $24M For Business Intelligence

By Deborah Gage for VentureWire

Redwood City, CA - January 18, 2012

Only three months after emerging from stealth mode with its cloud-based business intelligence software, Tidemark Systems Inc. has raised another $24 million in funding, taking its total to more than $35 million.

Redpoint Ventures led the Series C round, which includes current investors Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and Workday Inc. co-founder and co-Chief Executive Dave Duffield. Valuation is not disclosed.

Director Phil Wilmington, who joined Tidemark's board in October, has become the company's executive chairman.

Redpoint Founding Partner Geoff Yang, who's joining Tidemark's board, said he'd been asking to fund Tidemark "for awhile," partly because of Tidemark's business and partly because of its team, which includes founder and Chief Executive Christian Gheorghe. Gheorghe escaped to the U.S. from Romania in 1989 and arrived in New York speaking little English, with less than $30 in his pocket. He went on to co-found Saxe Marketing, which was sold to Experian, and then found TIAN Software Co., which was sold to OutlookSoft Corp., which was in turn sold to SAP AG.

"You try to invest in exceptional people...and he's battled all sorts of adversity and had remarkable success in this exact space," Yang said.

Tidemark offers a suite of software applications--including strategic, financial and operational planning; budgeting; and forecasting and profitability modeling--that run out of an HTML-5-based interface across iPads and other devices. The software includes components for processes, goals, risks and controls that can be configured by non-technical users, and it integrates with Microsoft Office documents and Adobe PDFs.

United States Sugar Corp., an 80-year-old company that farms 180,000 acres (an area about the size of Manhattan) to produce about 750,000 tons of sugar per year, will be using Tidemark to track performance--including unit costs, profitability and various measures of production--and get the information out to everybody involved, from C-level executives down to workers in the field.

The software is collaborative, so that if the CEO posts a question, for instance, the employee will be taken to the screen the CEO asked about. It will ultimately replace a static, 750-page PDF report that is derived from a SQL database and takes two days to compile, according to U.S. Sugar's Director of Strategic Planning and Analysis Luke Umphries.

"We're constantly striving to lower our farming costs and increase our efficiencies to remain competitive. The agricultural commodities business is a tough business," Umphries said.

The new money will be used to fuel growth and target Fortune 1000 customers. Gheorghe said that Wilmington, the new executive chairman and the former chief executive of OutlookSoft, will help because he has "the know-how of building a world-class operation in sales. He has the ability to take a lot of things and help us scale them into the market."

Reposted with permission of Dow Jones VentureWire.