San Diego-based Tealium, which provides Web-based technology that enables corporate marketing teams to manage their metadata tags, says it has secured $20 million in debt financing to help fuel the company’s global expansion.
Tealium has previously raised over $27 million in venture capital since it was founded six years ago.
In a phone interview yesterday, CFO Doug Lindroth said he joined Tealium in February in part to help CEO Jeff Lunsford evaluate the company’s overall capital structure and financing strategy. He was previously the CFO at Tempe, AZ-based Limelight Networks (NASDAQ: LLNW), where Lunsford was previously CEO and where Lindroth oversaw several M&A transactions and raised capital in the public markets.
Low interest rates and very little dilution of equity investors made debt financing very attractive now, Lindroth said. Silver Lake Waterman provided $15 million in debt and Silicon Valley Bank provided $5 million in a secured credit facility. The financing is intended to accelerate Tealium’s expansion across all business segments, including engineering, sales, customer service, and marketing.
Tealium’s growth remains solid, Lindroth added.
The company’s headcount, which was at about 150 employees in November, is now almost 180, with about 135 employees based at Tealium’s San Diego headquarters, Lindroth said. Tealium’s Lunsford has told me that eight senior hires made over the past six months were previously working at Websense and The Active Network—two local companies that are moving their respective headquarters from San Diego to Austin, TX.
“There’s a bunch of talented people [in San Diego] who don’t want to move to Austin,” Lunsford told me in a telephone interview a couple months ago.
As a privately held company, Tealium does not disclose its revenue. In a statement today, however, the company says its first-quarter revenue increased by 120 percent over the same quarter last year.
The company said its new customers and expanded strategic relationships during the first quarter included Calendars.com, Carhartt, Kabbage, Kimberly-Clark, and Wet Seal. About a quarter of the company’s new bookings came from AudienceStream, a service introduced last fall that unifies tag data, Lindroth said.
Tealium’s software-as-a-service enables marketing teams to manage “tags,” the snippets of JavaScript embedded in Web pages or e-mails. Tags are a creature of Web analytics, generating data that enable marketing teams to determine if users viewed a particular Web page or e-mail. Some Web pages may have dozens of embedded tags, and Tealium says its technology simplifies the process and speeds up website performance without requiring marketing teams to get their IT departments involved.
