Open-Xchange today announced that it has secured $20M in Series C funding to help advance its cloud-based collaboration and office productivity suite. Open-Xchange has raised EUR 27m ($35m) to date, including the new investment.
The new funding, led by United Internet Ventures, former Deutsche Bank COO Hermann-Josef Lamberti, and existing shareholders, will help extend the 50 percent year-over-year revenue and subscriber growth streak OX has had for the last 3 years.
The news comes a few weeks after Open-Xchange today announced partnership with home.pl, a Poland based web hosting provider.
In an Interview with DailyHostNews earlier this week, Rafael Laguna, CEO, Open-Xchange said “Open-Xchange recently acquired core developers from the Hamburg-based OpenOffice team as a significant long-term investment for the company and this required additional financing. With the latest investment, we plan to hire talent even more aggressively.”
“OX Text, the first application of the Cloud-based office productivity suite OX Documents, launched earlier this year, was built by the original members of the OpenOffice team. As a further addition to OX Documents, we plan to launch an app for online-editing of spreadsheets at OX Summit 2013 to be held at Hamburg this September,” he continued.
This addition of expertise to our board is critical as we expand our product offering during a time of great disruption in cloud-computing, and we’re thrilled to have investors who share our vision – to transform how people work.– Rafael Laguna, CEO, Open-Xchange.
Rafael Laguna, CEO, Open-Xchange.
The investment is split into a capital increase and a secondary transaction. The capital increase will provide Open-Xchange with additional cash for investments primarily in software development, professional services, international business development and marketing & sales.
The secondary transaction relates to the purchase of shares from one of Open-Xchange’s early investor investor who has sold at a profit and will no longer be investing in Open-Xchange.
OX has had profitable quarters over the last three years and the company’s revenue has grown 50 percent year-on -year over this time.
“This is an extremely exciting investment for us. Having been a customer of Open-Xchange for many years, we have seen the company evolve from a small vendor to a significant player in the cloud market. Open-Xchange´s vision of becoming the web desktop for cloud services makes this one of the most exciting software investment opportunities,” said Dr. Oliver Mauss, CEO, United Internet Ventures.
The company also announced that Dr. Oliver Mauss will join Open-Xchange´s supervisory board together with former Deutsche Bank COO Hermann-Josef Lamberti.
Among the other board members are Dr. Paul-Josef Patt, eCapital, as well as business angels Richard Seibt and Bernhard Woebker.
Dr. Oliver Mauss has been CEO of United Internet Ventures AG since 2013. He has a doctorate in communications engineering and has held various positions at Vodafone Group in the past. He was an executive board member of 1&1 Internet AG, and CEO of its hosting business from 2008 to 2013.
Mr. Lamberti, currently a Non-Executive Member of the Board of EADS N.V and ING Groep N.V, has held various management positions within IBM. Most recently, he served in the position of Chief Operating Officer at Deutsche Bank AG.
“This addition of expertise to our board is critical as we expand our product offering during a time of great disruption in cloud-computing, and we’re thrilled to have investors who share our vision – to transform how people work,” said Rafael.
Earlier this year, Open-Xchange launched OX App Suite, an innovative open source communication platform that provides a totally device and OS agnostic suite of productivity applications, integrating office, email and social media feeds all in one streamlined Web interface.
