Replicon, the developer of a cloud time tracking and expense management application, has raised $20 million Series A funding led by The Social + Capital Partnership and Emergence Capital Partners. This is actually the first time in the company’s 17-year history of raising money from institutional investors.
Co-founders Raj Narayanaswamy and Lakshmi Raj have largely bootstrapped the SaaS company on their own since its inception in 1996. Replicon’s products allow you to track project time and expenses, client billing, employee work schedules, and employee time and attendance. The company was originally founded in Canada but moved to Silicon Valley three years ago.
TimeSheet Project & Billing allows users to track project time and costs and create reports based off of this data. Managers can monitor project/task progress, actual vs. estimated hours/cost, and billing amounts. Users can track hours worked for both salaried and hourly employees, manage time off, set accrual policies, manage overtime rules, run attendance and payroll reports, and integrate with other payroll software.
Additionally managers can track employee expenses in multiple currencies, attach expense receipts, automatically calculate taxes such as VAT or GST, and monitor expense reimbursements. In terms of scheduling, the software allows you to track employee work schedules, make on-the-fly adjustments, and track actual work against the set schedule.
Quietly, Replicon, which is profitable, has accumulated more than 1.2 million users in 60 countries worldwide, with clients including Ernst & Young, Cornell University, Health Canada, Shell, Verizon, Ferrari and Amazon. The company says that it is projecting 60 to 80 percent growth by 2015.
It’s not that often you come across companies raising the first round of outside funding after 17 years of business. But Raj said the new capital is really focused on accelerating growth, and not being constrained with the expense on the balance sheet. The money will be primarily used towards sales and marketing, international expansion and hiring.