Akeneo, a France-based SaaS company working in the “product experience management” space, announced today that it raised a new $46 million round. The firm’s total capital raised to date is now north of $60 million, though likely higher as one of its corporate rounds was of an unknown size.
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Summit Partners led the new capital infusion, a Series C, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Alven, and Partech.1
The round caught my eye for two reasons. First, it’s money invested in a French company. I can’t recall the last time we covered a French startup’s funding event. And, second, the firm shared an interesting bit of growth data. It went as follows, with a slight lead-in from myself:
[The company has a]chieved compound 3-digit revenue growth for 6 consecutive years.
That’s quite impressive. If a firm started with $1 million in revenue, for example, after six years of merely doubling it would have grown to $64 million in revenue by the end of the period. Given that the firm simply claims “3-digit” growth, the compounding effect could be even sharper, though we lack an initial revenue figure to lean upon for context.
Doubling is an activity that really adds up. Doubling for more than a half-decade is the sort of growth that investors covet. Recall that investors these days are always hunting for the fabled “triple-triple-double-double,” a startup that triples its revenue in each of two consecutive years, and then doubles twice over the next two.
A company starting with $1 million in revenue would have $36 million after completing its “TTDD.” That sort of growth is venture capital catnip.
Back to Akeneo, the firm has 180 employees in a half-dozen countries per its own reporting, and intends to “hire 100 additional staff in the next year.” That will quickly spike its burn rate, so the new capital is likely very welcome.
As a final note, Akeneo is an open-source oriented company. It feels like these sorts of startups are not as common as we might have expected, a few years back. But after the huge Red Hat exit, and Microsoft’s embrace of open source (not to mention its GitHub purchase), perhaps we’re seeing more momentum for companies that leverage open code.
Illustration: Li-Anne Dias.
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