Oro of Beverly Grove, a developer of cloud-based customer relationship management software, has raised $12 million from private equity group Highland Europe.
Oro will spend its cash infusion on further product development, international sales efforts and adding software partners. This is the company’s first financing event to date.
Customer relationship management software is typically used to track communication between prospective customers or existing customers, and sales representatives. Oro’s CRM is open-sourced, 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 has also focused on building CRM products that integrate with e-commerce software, such as e-commerce platform Magento. By integrating with e-commerce platforms such as Magento, Oro claims to better track the sales results of a marketing efforts, customer service representatives and sales representatives.
“A lot of the e-commerce sites don’t have real visibility into the customer base,” said Oro Chief Executive and co-founder Yoav Kutner, who was also the former chief executive and co-founder of Magento of Culver City 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 something bad about them on Twitter.”
The CRM software market is dominated by Salesforce.com Inc. of San Francisco, 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 have dozens of companies have followed since.
Oro will have to nudge its way into that crowded field. The company believes it can carve out a section of the market by offering e-commerce integration and an open-sourced CRM 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 Kutner. “You have full control over the product.”
Oro’s products have been downloaded for free about 40,000 times and it has around 2000 paying users, since the company was launched in 2014, said Kutner. About 50 percent of the company’s customers are in the United States, 40 percent in Europe and 10 percent spread throughout the rest of the world, he said.
Technology reporter Garrett Reim can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @garrettreim for the latest in L.A. tech news.
