Tidemark, the cloud financial planning platform announced $25 million in additional funding today along with some new growth numbers.
Existing investors Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Redpoint Ventures, Tenaya Capital, and Silicon Valley Bank all participated in the round along with new investor, fellow cloud company Workday.
Today’s investment brings the total raised to $100 million.
Workday, which provides enterprise resource planning (ERP) in the cloud, makes a natural partner for Tidemark whose platform helps companies plan across finance and operations. The two companies make an interesting combination of tools and they have been working together since Tidemark’s inception, according to CEO Christian Gheorghe.
Tidemark has been on a roll, according to Gheorghe. He says the five year old company just experienced 4X growth, its best growth rate in the history of the company.
“The growth has been phenomenal in acquiring customers with broader transformational wins and a larger number of seats” Gheorghe said. It’s partly due to expanding the Tidemark product offerings to include subscription-based financial modeling, a growing requirement from customers.
“We are seeing a lot of demand and interest because more and more businesses are being driven by this type of reporting,” he said.
The growth has enabled them to expand further into Europe and they recently opened several new offices including London, Paris and Amsterdam.
Breaking Down Silos
As I wrote recently, siloed behavior continues to plague the enterprise and breaking down these barriers presents a huge challenge for organizations.
Tidemark as a company has had the goal of breaking down traditional barriers between finance and operations, Gheorghe said. As with any type of change, he has seen resistance, but he says one of their main bets five years ago was that companies would increasingly see the value in doing this.
“In order to break down silos, the key aspect of having a performance-driven organization, is the CFO and CIO have to collaborate and have tools to enable that collaboration,” he said.
“When you bridge the gap between finance and operations, we benchmark [the various business processes] and the CFO is exposing where and how the various processes break down. It’s harder to stay isolated when you see which processes work and which don’t,” Gheorghe explained.
What’s more, when you are exposing and bridging those processes, the silos begin to break down and you start to see the value, he said. That’s something you typically cannot do using Excel spreadsheets and a simple set of reports.
The challenge is convincing companies to change and giving up the comfortable and familiar. In some instances, the CFO may see the need, but the analysts will insist on sticking with Excel. In others, the analysts see it and the CFO is reluctant.
While Gheorghe recognizes this cultural component, he says the resistance to change is beginning to break down as customers see the value in trying new tools like Tidemark. When customers can’t see that value or only want to go only part way, sometimes he says, his company needs to walk away from a potential sale.
If the sales growth figures are accurate, he doesn’t have to do that very often.