Customer management firm SugarCRM raises $33M

Upstart SugarCRM adds funding to take on Salesforce, Microsoft

Customer relationship management software group SugarCRM announced Wednesday that it raised $33 million in funding.

Instead of maintaining its own servers and data centers, Sugar CRM hosts its services on Rackspace, Amazon Web Service, and IBM in order to keep its costs low and allow the company focus on the product rather than managing data centers.

The investment round was led by New Enterprise Associates and included participation from new investors Silicon Valley Bank and Gold Hill Capital. All of SugarCRM’s current investors including Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Walden International also participated. Brooke Seawell, Venture Partner at NEA has also joined SugarCRM’s Board of Directors. SugarCRM will use the funds to continue its advancement into the enterprise market and to pursue strategic business opportunities.

This round brings the company's total funding to $79.5 million.

SugarCRM is up against several CRM giants, including Microsoft Dynamic, Zoho and Salesforce. 

Up until recently SugarCRM has been focused on midsize businesses, and in the past year they've started specializing on bigger enterprise deals with its growing employee base of 260 individuals.

Of the $33 million, $14 million of the funding was equity and the other $19 million was for debt financing. 

SugarCRM, founded in 2004, has been downloaded more than ten million times and currently serves over 1 million users from over 6,000 companies in 192 countries.

Touting positive cash flow since Q4 2010, SugarCRM saw its sales grow 67% in 2010, and added more than 2,700 companies to its user base, which already includes Coca-Cola, Chevrolet, and Avis.

Last month, Bloomfire Inc. announced its $10 million in Series A funding from Austin Ventures and Redpoint Ventures. Bloomfire brought traditional CRM into the Learning Management Systems so it could incorporate training tools. 

Also in March, NationBuilder announced that it secured $6.25 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. NationBuilder synthesizes a Content Management System with a CRM into one service designed specifically to organize people. Before NationBuilder, it was challenging to meld these functions without a tech team and many thousands of dollars.

As software and interfaces continue to find more opportunities to work together, more VC firms want to be a part growing platform space.