PremjiInvest joins others in $115M Series C funding of US-based SaaS firm Zuora

PremjiInvest, the family office managing the private investments of Wipro promoter Azim Premji, has struck its second publicly known cross-border venture investment by participating in a Series C round of funding of California-based Zuora Inc. Zuora, which runs a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based subscription billing and financial solutions venture, has raised $115 million in the funding round round led by BlackRock, Passport Capital and Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com.

PremjiInvest joined other investors such as Wellington Management besides existing investors Benchmark Capital, Greylock, Redpoint, Index, Shasta, Vulcan, Next World Capital and Dave Duffield, co-founder and chairman of the board of Workday, to back Zuora.

The fund will be used for expansion into new geographies and vertical markets, team expansion and in research and development activities.

"The subscription economy is permeating every industry -- entertainment, technology, healthcare, manufacturing with IoT, consumer products, everything," said Tien Tzuo, co-founder and CEO, Zuora. "Customers are now subscribers, and the new way to acquire, bill and nurture customers is through monetising subscriber relationships. Our funding partners understand that this shift is creating a multi-billion dollar opportunity for a new category of software that sits between traditional CRM and ERP."

Founded in 2007, Zuora's relationship business management (RBM) platform allows companies to manage the entire lifecycle of the subscriber, including customer acquisition, recurring billing and payments, revenue recognition, and subscription metrics.

The latest funding round brings the total amount of capital raised by Zuora to $250 million.

On Wednesday, an Indian venture which is in the same space, ChargeBee, raised $5 million in its Series B round from Tiger Global and Accel Partners.

For PremjiInvest, which has been active in mid-late VC deals besides growth equity deals in India, this is the second such transactions in a US-based firm.

Last year, it invested in another US-based software firm Datastax Inc. It joined other investors in a similar Series C round of funding which was worth $106 million.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)