Ontario-based Fusebill, a company that offers online software to help companies deal with and support subscription-based businesses and billing cycles, has raised a new $2 million round of funding. The financing will be used to help the company expand its offering and grow its user base, Fusebill CEO Steve Adams explained in an interview.
Securing this funding from OMERS and Covington is significant, as both are among Canada’s top investment firms. Fusebill’s offering is definitely in OMERS’ wheelhouse, as it deals with a key transaction point for online businesses. Managing the subscription billing process for companies is definitely a growth market, as more businesses are turning to a recurring fee model in offering SaaS-style products. Fusebill automates the entire process of accepting payments, targeting mid-sized businesses mostly with a solution that’s more affordable than the bigger players in the space like Zuora.
“There’s a good class of solutions for enterprises, they’re good products, they’re just extraordinarily expensive,” Adams said. “They’re not acceptable to smaller businesses, so we’re working with companies that are smaller and that don’t need quite the range of functionality that you might get from a Zuora, and are happy to work with a standardized product.”
Fusebill also offers pricing options aimed at startup companies, which is another thing that makes it clearly separate from the larger players. It fields credit card payments, can handle adjustments, discounts on a one-time or recurring basis is completely PCI compliant and also integrates with other popular e-commerce software. Another issue that Adams made sure was built into Fusebill was an analytics component, which can help identify churn and its causes, as well as spell out ARPU and other key metrics in detail.
Plans for the funding include future product development, but a key area for Fusebill now is marketing, and this round will help most with those efforts, according to Adams.
“In the near term it’s sort of steady as it goes, but the expansion will really be around building out the product for another set of customers that we have in mind, and more product development, and also building out a sales and marketing side of the business,” he said. “But what we’re really focused on is getting the product in front of more customers.”
SaaS and other subscription-based online e-commerce ventures are on the rise, and Fusebill provides the tools companies need to make that happen without building their own in-house solution. Fusebill already has a strong customer base, mostly in the U.S., and with this fresh investment it now hopes to accelerate that growth.