ServiceMax: A Classic Series A Investment Success Story
Update: December 2022 — PTC recently acquired ServiceMax for $1.5B in cash, from an entity majority owned by Silver Lake. Cloud Apps Capital Partners is thrilled by the continued success of leading SaaS field service management provider ServiceMax, helping household name PTC grow their cloud footprint, and as a firm, we believe this demonstrates the winning strategy of Classic Series A investments.
The Cloud Apps Capital Partners team applauds the ServiceMax team on the $915M acquisition by GE Digital; the largest cloud acquisition in Q4 2016. We are honored to be an investor and to have shared in the journey of ServiceMax, the world’s leading cloud field service software company.
As we congratulate Athani Krishna, Hari Subramanian and Dave Yarnold on an incredible journey from a small team to a company that revolutionized the global field service industry, we want to highlight three important foundational elements that ServiceMax and other Enterprise Cloud global market leaders share at the early stage.
Domain Expertise
Having worked in the field service software industry since the 1990's, Athani and Hari are examples of founders with deep domain expertise. This expertise brings a unique understanding of customer needs and challenges, enabling the design and development of meaningful and valuable products that the market embraces.
Leverage the Right Cloud Platform
Cloud platforms such as Salesforce, Amazon Web Services, Azure, and Google are enabling unprecedented growth and serviceability of global SMB and enterprise customers for cloud-based businesses. ServiceMax was the first field service management application built on the Salesforce platform, and one of the earliest mission-critical enterprise cloud applications.
The Classic Series A Financing and The Right Early Executive Hires
After building the early product, the founders needed to raise capital and grow their team with the right go-to-market executives. In 2008, while at Emergence Capital, Matt Holleran sourced and championed ServiceMax’s $2M Classic Series A financing. He was the original Salesforce VP AppExchange & Force.com ISV Partners and was uniquely qualified to see ServiceMax’s $18B global market opportunity and its fit for the Salesforce platform. As a Series A board member for ServiceMax, Matt added value on multiple levels, particularly in the recruitment of early key executives.
Recruiting early executives is one of the most valuable forms of assistance a venture firm can provide a very early-stage cloud business application company. Matt leveraged his former experience as the first sales and marketing executive at a start-up software company with no customers to recruit two early executives for ServiceMax; executives who possessed the right background and style to make an extraordinary impact on the company.
· Dave Yarnold, CEO. Dave had the unique combination of customer support and field service software experience as VP of Sales at Clarify, and as enterprise SaaS VP Global Sales at SuccessFactors from early traction to global leader. His experience and high-integrity leadership style made him the ideal CEO to lead the company from Series A through global leadership.
· Charles Lawson, the first Director of Sales and salesperson. Charles’ experience selling mission-critical applications to end customers with complex products as Director of Sales at Arena Solutions and as Sales Development Manager at Datasweep made him an exemplary first sales hire and positioned him to close many of ServiceMax’s first 20 customers.
Dave and Charles have longstanding relationships with Cloud Apps Capital Partners, having both worked with Matt at Clarify and Datasweep respectively. At our firm, we hold in esteem the value of our relationships with our network and endeavor to identify opportunities like the early ServiceMax hires.
The Rise of the Enterprise Cloud Business Model
ServiceMax is an excellent example of mission-critical enterprise business applications moving into the cloud, and is the inspiration of our firm including the Classic Series A investment and value-add model. At Cloud Apps Capital Partners, we are honored to be the lead Series A investor in the next great Enterprise Cloud company Propel PLM, a cloud product lifecycle management company.
Congratulations again to the ServiceMax team. For more information on the ServiceMax acquisition or the next wave of mission-critical cloud business applications, we invite you to view Forbes Billion-Dollar Startup ServiceMax Sells To General Electric For $915 Million, our 2014 Dreamforce Presentation on the Enterprise Cloud Model, and Propelplm.com, or connect with us — we’d be happy to talk cloud business applications with you.
~ The Cloud Apps Capital Partners Team
