Oro of Beverly Grove, a developer of cloud-based customer relationship management software, has raised $12 million from private equity group Highland Europe of London.
The firm said the cash infusion will be spent on further product development, international sales efforts and adding software partners. This is the company’s first financing event.
Customer relationship management software is typically used to track communication between prospective or existing customers and sales reps. Oro’s software is open sourced, meaning it can be developed collaboratively by the public, which the company claims gives flexibility and customizability to businesses. The software can either be hosted in the cloud or on its client’s local servers.
Oro will have to nudge its way into that crowded customer relationship field. The market is dominated by San Francisco’s Salesforce.com Inc., which had an 18.4 percent market share as of 2014, according to a report by Gartner. Salesforce was one of the first companies to host CRM software in the cloud and dozens of companies have followed.
Oro believes it can carve out a section of the market by offering e-commerce integration and an open-sourced product that will allow clients to customize the platform.
“You don’t have to be a developer to configure the product or to create new entities in the product,” said Oro Chief Executive and co-founder Yoav Kutner. “You have full control over the product.”
The firm has also focused on building products that integrate with e-commerce software such as Magento, which Oro claims will aid online retailers.
“A lot of the e-commerce sites don’t have real visibility into the customer base,” said Kutner, who was also the former chief executive and co-founder of Culver City’s Magento before it sold to eBay in 2011. “The businesses don’t know who their customers are; how they interact with them; if they opened a ticket; if they said something bad about them on Twitter.”
Oro’s products have been downloaded for free about 40,000 times and it has accumulated around 2,000 paying users since launching in 2014, said Kutner. About 50 percent of the company’s customers are in the United States, while 40 percent come from Europe and the remaining 10 percent are spread throughout the rest of the world.
Faraday’s Future
Electric-car maker Faraday Future of Gardena has sent a letter to the Nevada Governor’s Office of Economic Development promising to back infrastructure around its North Las Vegas factory with a surety bond worth about $75 million.
The letter comes after state Treasurer Dan Swartz last month said he was growing concerned about whether Faraday or its billionaire Chinese backer, Jia Yueting, could put up the money needed for the company’s proposed $1 billion electric-car factory. Several media reports have also questioned the state of Faraday’s finances.
After returning from a trip to China, Swartz said several individuals there told him that Jia did not have the money to fund the project, although he did not talk with Jia directly.
Swartz also said he was concerned that Faraday’s financing source was effectively frozen because a large portion of Jia’s wealth reportedly was tied up in shares of his company, Leshi Internet Information & Technology, which stopped trading in China on Dec. 4 for a corporate restructuring.
Faraday has publicly committed to selling its first electric car next year, though it has yet to show a functioning prototype or complete its factory. Thus far, the company has hired more than 750 employees, opened a design center in Gardena, and has begun clearing brush and leveling land at its future factory site.
The state of Nevada is offering $217 million worth of incentives including infrastructure projects such as roads, a rail line, water pipes, etc., to help Faraday jump-start its factory in North Las Vegas. Faraday is footing the bill for the $1 billion plant, but the state wanted about $75 million from the auto maker as security in case something goes wrong.
The company has also promised to put $13 million in an escrow account to help finance water, wastewater and rail facilities surrounding its factory.
Rebooting
Satellite manufacturer Millennium Space Systems of El Segundo has hired Bob Newberry as executive vice president and chief marketing officer. Newberry is a retired Air Force officer and formerly served as chief of the foreign military sales program for the F-16 fighter plane. … Snapchat of Venice has hired Facebook Inc. executive Sriram Krishnan, who will join the app maker’s growth and revenue team. Krishnan founded Facebook’s mobile ad network and worked on mobile monetization products at the social platform.
Staff reporter Garrett Reim can be reached at [email protected] or (323)549-5225, ext. 232
