1995-founded BrainStorm secures its first Series A

Technology for teaching Microsoft Office 365 picks up new funds to move faster in corporate learning

BrainStorm, a software adoption and change management provider, today announced that it has raised a $6.4 million Series A round of funding led by Kickstart Seed Fund with with additional participation from Jeremy Andrus, former President and CEO at Skullcandy.

This announcement is all sorts of interesting (and not just because change management technology totally rocks my socks).

First of all, since when does a company founded in 1995 raise a Series A round in 2015? Especially in the first quarter in years where we’re witnessing venture capital slowdown! The answer is the company has been bootstrapped since swapping hands in 2000.

"We have grown well, we have been profitable over the past 10 years, and we have learned how to get a significant ROI on the money we had to invest," according to Eric Farr, BrainStorm's Principal & Executive Officer. "However, there are a lot of factors that have pointed us to raising money in 2015 so that we can begin to move even faster."

Namely, the company's flagship SaaS solution (more on that below) has been a "huge success," fueling the company's profits and motivating the team to expand their offering.

The second thing I have to ask about this announcement: why is Kickstart Seed Fund—a seed fund—leading a Series A round? Well, this isn’t the first time. Though the the Utah-based firm typically leads seed rounds for startups headquartered in the Beehive State, it has led several Series A rounds before:

• DirectScale, sales management software, October 2014
• Lucid Software, graphic design tools, May 2014
• Contatta, CRM, July 2013
• RackWare, cloud software, June 2013

At least they stay true to early-stage investments. And maybe the firm is smart to be flexible in their definition of a “seed stage startup” versus a “Series A startup,” considering all the talk at Post Seed earlier this week around how these typically well-defined phases have slowly shifted over the past few years.

But back to BrainStorm.

The company’s flagship software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, QuickHelp, is a training solution designed to teach end users how to use office software more fully and productively. By office software, they mean Microsoft Office 365, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Sharepoint, Windows 7, Publisher, OneNote, Visio, Project, InfoPath, Access, and Internet Explorer (IE).

As one can imagine, BrainStorm is happy to partner closely with Microsoft, on whose products QuickHelp is founded.

“BrainStorm is a valued partner and has created innovative solutions that help our mutual customers get the most out of their Office 365 experience,” said Catherine Boeger, General Manager at Microsoft Corp, in today’s press release announcing the Series A.

QuickHelp teaches users how to use all this software through thousands of training clips embedded with searchable content, all hosted in the cloud. Additional tools include email push and in-application notifications, assigned content, event calendaring and registration, interest groups, and live webinar events. Social media integration is in the works.

BrainStorm counts several top names among its clients, including Budweiser, Duke University, Toyota, and Home Depot.

The company says it will use the new funding to grow sales, business development, and marketing, as well as to build out the technology for its current offerings.