Stealth Startup Proferi Raises $6.3 Million From Andreessen Horowitz, Duffield, and Greylock

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.