Aria Systems, which helps enterprises grow recurring revenue, announced it has raised US$50 million in new capital.
Existing investors Bain Capital Ventures, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, InterWest Partners, Venrock and VMware are joined by new investors Rembrandt Venture Partners, Madison Bay Capital Partners and Hercules Technology Growth Capital. The investment is driven by the accelerating global enterprise adoption of recurring revenue models, and will further the company’s leadership in providing best-in-class monetisation solutions for the enterprise. The funding is reflective of Aria’s rapid growth trajectory and comes in the wake of a record-breaking year. Recent customer wins span key verticals and includes examples of disruptive companies in their respective categories. New enterprise customers include Atlassian, Edmunds.com, Falck, LogMeIn, Sungard AS and Zipcar. Global expansion deals include Audi, Experian, Netgear, Philips Healthcare and Roku.
Continued Customer Success
Investor interest was fueled by Aria’s continued enterprise success across verticals, including automotive, entertainment, high tech, medical and telecommunications, as well as a wide array of innovative IoT plays. Interest also was driven by Aria’s ability to transform customers’ billing operations into monetisation engines for growth.
“Aria’s monetisation platform allows us to reduce our time to market for new services without requiring significant additional development,” said Josh Crowe, CTO of availability and managed IT services provider Sungard AS. “With Aria, we can quickly leverage an expanded product catalog globally to ensure our customers can select the exact plan that meets their pricing and billing needs.”
By streamlining the complete recurring revenue operations process across marketing, finance, and IT, Aria helps cross-functional teams get a wider variety of offerings to market faster. These teams can quickly test and iterate on pricing and monetisation models to better serve their customers and increase revenue.
Investor interest was fuelled in part by Aria’s continued enterprise success in enabling a wide array of innovative IoT plays. Specifically, Aria helps companies leverage and monetise the IoT through an agile cloud recurring revenue management solution which also features the first fully embedded analytics platform.
Leaders emerging around the IoT
Companies are able to make money by monitoring, measuring and metering this brave new world of interconnected devices. By connecting smart sensors, devices, and applications together a multitude of new services are possible—services that offer people greater personalisation and more control than ever.
Here are a few of the companies already doing just that. The monetisation models they’re using are as diverse as the services they offer.
With Nexia Home Intelligence Aria says your home “keeps pace with your daily life”. Operate connected lights, appliances, thermostats, and door locks from anywhere through its all-in-one app. The monetisation model is a Starter Kit + $9.99/month Subscription.
Wireless sensors in the wearable Jawbone UP lifestyle tracker aim to help you get better sleep, stay active, and eat smarter. A free app includes built-in analytics that provide ongoing insights, tips, and reminders to help you reach your goals. Here the monetisation model is a one-time payment and free app.
The sensor-based Streetline Parking solution works in conjunction with mobile apps to help drivers find empty spaces in real time, make reservations, and pay by phone. It also provides analytics that help cities improve parking efficiency. This monetisation model includes an upfront installation cost plus a monthly fee.
“Aria has the best solution for enterprise organisations that are saddled with slow and expensive legacy systems that can’t deploy recurring revenue initiatives quickly and efficiently,” said Lars Leckie, managing director at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. “Aria has the right executive team and the right product at the right time to extend and capture the lion’s share of success.”
“We are thrilled with the surging enterprise market adoption of Aria and the strategic focus our customers have to improve their recurring revenue businesses,” said Tom Dibble, president & CEO, Aria Systems. “Our investment partners provide us with their extensive experience in enterprise cloud, along with capital to provide a truly enterprise-grade level of support and service to our global customers. We look forward to building upon our record-setting 2015 and to establishing successful long-term partnerships with a new wave of customers.”
Major industry recognition
Evaluating the company’s platform are two recent reports from industry analyst firms MGI Research and Forrester Research. In naming Aria a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Subscription Billing Platforms, Q4 2015 Forrester Research stated, “the platform is well suited to support consumption/usage-based billing, multidimensional product/service structures, and complex B2B environments that have multilayered account structures and hierarchies.”
“With this latest infusion backed by an impressive investment roster, Aria is poised to be the category breakout in worldwide agile billing, whose total addressable market is expected to reach $14.8 billion by 2020,” said Andrew Dailey, managing director, MGI Research. “Satisfaction among Aria customers is high, and the company has progressively fortified its solutions to effectively and affordably scale within global enterprises across an array of industries.”
Record Achievement and Growth
Aria’s funding will further fuel marketing, sales and development efforts that extend the company’s record 2015 accomplishments.
Comment on this article below or via Twitter: @IoTNow_ OR @jcIoTnow
