Cloud-based billing solutions co ChargeBee raises $5M in Series B from Tiger & Accel

Chennai-based and US-incorporated BubblePath Inc, which operates under the brand ChargeBee and provides cloud-based subscription billing and recurring billing solutions to small & medium enterprises in India and abroad, has raised $5 million (Rs 31 crore) in its Series B round of funding from Tiger Global and existing investor Accel Partners, as per a company statement.

The money raised will be invested in expanding the engineering and customer support team, as well as the product offering, and for building local presence in key markets like the US, the UK and Australia.

"The funding will help us meet the need of the SaaS market, which has grown 5x, faster than on-premise software, to $22 billion globally," said Krish Subramanian, co-founder and CEO, ChargeBee.

This round takes the startups' total funding to date to $6.17 million. Last year, it had raised $800,000 from Accel Partners. Prior to that, it had raised $350,000 in funding from unnamed angel investors located in the US.

The startup was set up in May 2011 by Subramanian, Saravanan KP (CTO), Rajaraman Santhanam (product manager) and Thiyagarajan T (senior developer). Subramanian holds a BE and has over 10 years' experience of working with enterprise-level customers in the software services industry. Saravanan, Rajaraman and Thiyagarajan are former Zoho employees and bring in years of experience in product development, API design and application development.

ChargeBee meets the subscription management and recurring billing requirements of companies and with its solutions in place, enterprises can automate online credit card billing and track unpaid invoices. Additionally, all transactional e-mail messages can be customised and automated in the recurring billing system. ChargeBee also delivers real-time analytics.

The company's pricing plans start at $49, and it also offers a bootstrapper plan that enables its customers to use ChargeBeefor free till they reach 10 customer monthly billing. It has partnered with 2Checkout, Payment Express, PayPal, QuickPay and Braintree for payment gateways to facilitate its solutions.

According to Subramanian, the startup is currently processing over $100 million worth of transactions annually.

It competes with Zuora, Recurly and Chargify.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)