Asera, Inc., a provider of Internet solutions for the business-to-business demand chain, announced today that the company has secured a total of $115 million at the completion of its Series C round of funding.
The privately held Belmont, Calif., company will use the funding to meet the growing demand for the Asera eService and its e-business platform, and to expand and scale operations both domestically and internationally. “We’re going to keep building out our service,” Kurt Garbe, Asera COO, told ASP News.
Asera’s eService provides Internet solutions for the business-to-business demand chain — the process of marketing, selling and supporting products through distribution channels. The Asera eService can be configured and personalized to support unique channel strategies.
Such options as catalogs, auctions, order management features, message boards and forums are just some of the many choices a customer has when configuring the eService, Garbe said. “It’s all tied together to form a personal environment, and everything goes back to the ability to integrate with a customer’s back-end systems,” he said.
Garbe asserts that Asera is not a consulting shop, but likens the eService to a utility. “It’s more of a phone company model,” he said. “The service is running, and customers come and choose what options they want, and we implement them. They only pay for what they use.”
There are currently 24 customers signed up for Asera’s eService, with 12 who are live, including BP Amoco, Applied Materials, Wyse Technology and Cadence, Garbe said. “It takes about 90 days to go live, but then all of our customers can change and grow,” he said. “All of the ones who are live are working with us on their next phase of development.”
Leading the Series C investors is Bowman Capital, the investment firm which also led Asera’s Series B funding round. Other investors include Amerindo Investment Advisors, Inc., BP Amoco plc, Capital Research and Management Company, AC Ventures, the venture capital unit of Andersen Consulting, Eastman Chemical Company, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, KTB Network Corporation, Laurinvest, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, Nortel Networks, SAP Ventures, Siemens AG, and TIBCO Software Inc.
This third round of funding brings the total capital raised so far to $172 million, following a $52 million Series B funding round in December 1999 and $5 million in seed funding in 1998.