Channelinsight closes $10M Series C round

The channel sales solutions provider gets support from Rho Ventures and other major VC firms

The channel sales management solution provider, Channelinsight, announced Wednesday that it has raised $10 million in a Series C round led by Rho Ventures, with help from Sevin Rosen Funds, Sequel Venture Partners and Vedanta Capital. The new capital brings Channelinsight’s total raised to $21 million.

Formerly known as InfoNow, Channelinsight offers a suite of services and solutions to help technology manufacturers track their end customers, what their buying, and the details of every transaction in real-time. The company currently processes over 120 million points of sale and inventory transactions each year and serves such customers as Lexmark, AMD, Siemens, Polycom, and more.

Among the company’s offerings are a best practices assessment, which provides a comprehensive assessment of a business’s channel sales performance; a customer master clean-up, which consolidates all of a business’s customers into one list to avoid shipping and communications problems; pricing historical data, which uses a business’s historical performance to gauge its present performance; an analytics consulting service; and more.

“Our expertise is in identifying and investing in companies that redefine the status quo,” said Rho Ventures partner and Channelinsight board member Paul Bartlett in a statement. “Channelinsight fits this profile by reinventing the way channel sales are managed, saving companies millions of dollars in the process. We believe Channelinsight has the right combination of talent and products to effectively capture, and sustain its leadership in, the market.”

In addition to the new funding, Channelinsight also announced that Ram Gupta will be joining the company’s board of directors. Formerly the CEO, President, and Executive Chairman of Cast Iron Systems until it was acquired by IBM in 2010, Gupta holds a number of U.S. patents and in the year 2000, he was awarded the Smithsonian Computer World "Search for the Heroes" Award.

"We are using the money from this round to double our channel partner network (these are distributors, resellers and retailers that submit sales and inventory data to us, numbering in the thousands already), to extend our aggregated data services and analytics capability and further extend our integration with salesforce.com," Channelinsight CEO Mark Geene told me. "We are also expanding our sales and marketing capacity to support rapid growth and expansion."

Image source: Channelinsight.com