Jamcracker Scores Big

IT service aggregator Jamcracker Inc. today announced a remarkable second round of financing totaling over $100 million.

Affiliates of Soros Private Equity Partners led the $85 million preferred financing round, with new investors Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse First Boston, Pivotal Asset Management, e4e, The Rolling Thunder Networks, Robertson Stephens and Bay Partners joining previous investors Internet Capital Group, Navis Partners (formerly Fleet Equity), First Analysis Corporation, and a handful of angel investors. The money will go toward opening new offices, hardware and software purchases, and development. Soros partner Neal Moskowski will join Jamcracker’s board.

The $15 million equipment financing was led by GATX Ventures, Inc. and includes Western Technology Investment, Third Coast Capital, Transamerica Business Credit Corporation and Sand Hill Capital.

Jamcracker offers small to medium-sized businesses web-based applications and services in the business services, enterprise-wide services and core services categories. These services are built and managed by independent ASPs including OpenAir.com, BizTone, Icarian, Critical Path, MyCIO, webEx, diCarta, United Messaging and Employease.

The various applications are incorporated into a single interface, called Jamcracker Central. Through Jamcracker Central, users can access applications and services, purchase new services from Jamcracker partners, and pay one consolidated Jamcracker bill. Jamcracker Central also contains a help area where users can submit and review service requests, view detailed status reports and analysis of activity.

The interoperability of applications on the Jamcracker platform is achieved through the use of a new flavor of XML called ITML (information technology markup language) to enable the quick integration of partner services into the Jamcracker platform when the required XML DTDs (document type definitions) are not available.

Jamcracker currently has over 30 customers in various stages of development, including sales channel management firm Channel Automation and VC firms Crescendo Ventures, First Analysis Venture Capital and Katalyst.

Jamcracker was founded in 1999 by Exodus Communications founder K.B. Chandrasekhar, now Jamcracker chairman and CEO, along with VP corporate development Mark Terbeek and CFO Herald Chen. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based ASP is forging a path in the aggregator category, along with such rivals as Agiliti and Biztro.

See related ASP News story on InternetNews.com, Jamcracker Expands Service Platform, Aug 31st 2000.