ServiceNow, one of the most valuable software companies ever founded in San Diego, launched in 2003, before enterprise software-as-a-service became a topic of mainstream discussion.
Today’s tech landscape is dotted with companies that investors have valued at $1 billion or more—an elite club, members of which have come to be known as “unicorns,” and dozens of SaaS firms are among them. These billion-dollar (and more) companies are a mix of publicly traded firms, such as San Francisco’s Salesforce (NYSE: [[ticker:CRM]]), and private, venture capital-backed startups, like San Diego’s Seismic, which provides companies with tools to beef up their sales and marketing collateral.
Perspectium, based in the San Diego community of Rancho Bernardo, was founded in 2013 by David Loo (pictured), the first outside hire that ServiceNow (NYSE: [[ticker:NOW]]) made, to head its development team. (That company, whose bread and butter is cloud-based software, moved its headquarters north, to Santa Clara, following its IPO in 2012.)
Loo, an integrations specialist, says it was that experience, and others before it, that revealed to him the need for a better way to integrate services like those that ServiceNow and many others now provide. He saw companies developing in-house solutions to ensure data was accessible across multiple enterprise application frameworks, or hiring consultants to figure it out. Perspectium says it does that work for companies, integrating processes and making data available outside the siloes created by applications and services they use—all as a service, of course.
One of the first companies to buy in was Accenture (NYSE: [[ticker:ACN]]), a Fortune 500 consultancy, Loo says. In 2017, Perspectium received its first outside investment: an $8 million Series A round, from locally based software investor TVC Capital.
On Tuesday the company announced that it had recently closed a Series B round: another $8 million from TVC, which it plans to use to ramp up sales and marketing and to build out its development and operations team in San Diego. Between the two financing rounds, the company grew from about 40 employees to more than 100, and launched its first international office, in London.
Today, a slew of large companies use Perspectium’s service management integration software, including GE (NYSE: [[ticker:GE]]). Last week, the company debuted a product that integrates the ServiceNow system with the cloud business run by Amazon (NASDAQ: [[ticker:AMZN]]). That means data related to IT incidents in Amazon Web Services are now visible in a company’s IT management system, eliminating the need to use both systems to track and resolve such issues.
“The company has several of these major partnership opportunities, which really puts the company in the middle of what every large-scale IT organization is having to deal with and having to manage, and we have the opportunity to be in the center of all that,” said Steve Hamerslag, managing partner at TVC Capital.
