Bothell, WA-based Winshuttle said today it has raised $12 million in growth equity financing from Summit Partners.
It’s big news for the business software company, which hasn’t taken outside financing until now. Winshuttle, which has been one of the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S. over the last few years, bootstrapped its way to profitability by landing big customers like Starbucks, Nike, Johnson & Johnson, and Proctor & Gamble. Now it has a big Silicon Valley investor—and bigger ambitions. (Although $12 million doesn’t seem like too much money; the company was on pace to do $10 million in sales back in 2008.)
Winshuttle was founded in 2003 by Vikram Chalana and Rajat Oberoi. The idea was to make software to help companies “shuttle” huge reams of data between different programs—for instance, bridging the gap between familiar programs like Excel, which anyone can use, and sophisticated business-management software put out by German software giant SAP. The firm found success relatively quickly and has been expanding in Europe the past couple of years. The company had 90 employees worldwide as of February 2010.
“Winshuttle is perfectly poised to rapidly scale our business,” said Lewis Carpenter, the company’s CEO, in a statement. “Even though we have strong cash and profit positions, we felt that a quality investor like Summit Partners would help position us to act more strategically in evaluating new market entries and potential acquisition targets.”
Xconomy first profiled Winshuttle in July 2008, calling it “the most successful software startup you’ve never heard of,” and later named Winshuttle one of the five unsung heroes of the Seattle tech scene. Consider it sung now.
