Stealth startup Proferi closed a $6.3 million Series A funding today. Investors include Andreessen Horowitz, PeopleSoft and Workday founder Dave Duffield, and Greylock Partners, who led the round. Aneel Bhusri, a Greylock partner and co-founder of Workday, will join the board, along with Duffield and Ben Horowitz.
Proferi was founded by Romanian entrepreneur Christian Gheorghe. Proferi is creating somethingcalled “enterprise performance management,” which sounds like some sort of analytics around corporate and individual performance in companies. Horowitz describes what the company does metaphorically in this post:
Proferi is still in stealth mode, so the easiest way for me to describe them is through the lens of their inventor. Proferi is to enterprise software applications as the United States is to Communist Romania. Historically, like Communist Romania, enterprise software has been highly restrictive, inflexible, slow-to-change, slow in general and, quite frankly, oppressive. In addition, customers have been forced to conform their business processes to the underlying data models, limiting the software’s general usefulness. As he did with his own life, Christian has completely re-imagined the category from top to bottom.
With Proferi, the solution resides in the cloud, but this is only the beginning. Christian throws out the old data models, databases, and data restrictions. He then ejects the scale restrictions, broken user interaction paradigms, and performance bottlenecks. Rather than defining their business by their data model, customers define their business by the real people and processes that they use. And the resulting applications perform 1000X faster than their communist, excuse me, enterprise software counterparts.
Sounds awesome. Now, Proferi has to live up to that drumroll.
Proferi thinks that it’s time to rethink analytic applications. It’s time for self-reliant applications for every user, not more meaningless reports that no one reads. It’s time for actionable, predictive, collaborative applications that cut across transactive business processes, not more applications that create new silos. It’s time for cloud-based, community-managed applications that become smarter through the power of the network.
Andreessen Horowitz is a $2.5 billion venture capital firm that was launched on July 6, 2009. Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, John O’Farrell, Scott Weiss, Jeff Jordan, and Peter Levine are the general partners of the firm.
Greylock partners with entrepreneurs to help them build market-leading businesses. Over the past 45 years the firm has worked with hundreds of companies, 150 of which have gone on to IPOs and 100 of which have gone on to profitable M&A events. Such companies include Ascend Communications, CheckFree, CipherTrust, Constant Contact, Continental Cable, Decru, Data Domain, DoubleClick, Farecast, Internet Security Systems, Ikanos, Legato, Media Metrix, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Openwave, Open Market, OutlookSoft, Polyserve, Red Hat, RightNow Technologies, Success Factors, Tellabs,...
Dave Duffield is an accomplished software industry executive and visionary. He has an extensive history of pioneering new ground in business applications. Dave founded PeopleSoft in 1987 and served as the company’s CEO and board chairman. He was responsible for the company’s vision, product and market direction, and commitment to customer service. In addition, he inspired the company’s unique culture by promoting core values that focused on people, innovation, integrity and fun. PeopleSoft grew to be the world’s second-largest...
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