Zuora gets $36M infusion for subscription billings

The company is storming across Europe and expanding product lines

Subscription billing platform Zuora announced Wednesday that it has raised $36 million in a Series D round of funding led by Index Ventures, with help from Greylock Partners, Workday co-CEO Dave Duffield, and existing investors Benchmark Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Tenaya Capital, and Marc Benioff.  The new round brings Zuora’s total raised to $82.5 million.

Founded in 2007, Zuora offers a cloud-based subscription billing service for businesses, providing pricing flexibility for different customer groups, scalability, and key metrics.  All of these features are designed to help any company develop a subscription business, a la Netflix or Pandora.  And Zuora claims that many of its customers are up and running within 90 days and seeing 200% ROI within weeks.

The company is poised on the brink of what it sees as an inevitable shift away from the “buy once” economy toward a services-based subscription economy.

"The product-focused, industrial economy and the systems that support it are part of the past,” said Zuora co-founder and CEO Tien Tzuo, in a statement.  “It's time for a new system for the Subscription Economy.  More and more, companies are turning to Zuora to drive their future.”

Plenty of businesses are heeding the call.  Zuora’s impressive clientele includes Box, Branchout, DocuSign, Yammer, Ning, Ooyala, Salesforce.com’s Radian6 division, Ustream, and more.  Zuora has also forced partnerships with PayPal, Microsoft, Netsuite, Workday, Salesforce.com, and VMware.

Among the company’s healthy list of accomplishments include 100% growth in annual bookings since the company’s inception, as well as 10 deals over $1 million in the last 18 months.  Additionally, it has doubled the company’s size to nearly 200 employees this year.

Zuora was not immediately available to comment, so no word on what kind of revenue the company is seeing these days, but when we covered the company’s last round of funding in November 2010, Zuora claimed to have grown 400% in 2009 and was on track to do the same in 2010.  Additionally, the company has been cash-flow positive since Q1 2010. 

The new funds from this round will be used to power international expansion and product line development.  Zuora announced today that it's rapidly expanding across the Netherlands, Germany, France and Ireland, and that it has already signed $2.7 billion in contracted subscription revenue with customers in the EMEA region. 

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