Aria Systems, which helps enterprises grow recurring revenue, announced it has raised US$50 million in new capital.

Existing investors Bain Capital Ventures, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, InterWest Partners, Venrock and VMware are joined by new investors Rembrandt Venture Partners, Madison Bay Capital Partners and Hercules Technology Growth Capital.

The investment is driven by the accelerating global enterprise adoption of recurring revenue models, and will further the company’s leadership in providing best-in-class monetisation solutions for the enterprise. The funding is said to be reflective of Aria’s rapid growth trajectory and comes in the wake of a record-breaking year. Recent customer wins span key verticals and includes examples of disruptive companies in their respective categories. New enterprise customers include Atlassian, Edmunds.com, Falck, LogMeIn, Sungard AS and Zipcar. Global expansion deals include Audi, Experian, Netgear, Philips Healthcare and Roku.

Continued customer success

Investor interest was fuelled by Aria’s continued enterprise success across verticals, including automotive, entertainment, high tech, medical and telecommunications, as well as a wide array of innovative IoT investors plays. Interest also was driven by Aria’s ability to transform customers’ billing operations into monetisation engines for growth.

“Aria’s monetisation platform allows us to reduce our time to market for new services without requiring significant additional development,” said Josh Crowe, CTO of availability and managed IT services provider Sungard AS. “With Aria, we can quickly leverage an expanded product catalog globally to ensure our customers can select the exact plan that meets their pricing and billing needs.”

By streamlining the complete recurring revenue operations process across marketing, finance, and IT, Aria helps cross-functional teams get a wider variety of offerings to market faster. These teams can quickly test and iterate on pricing and monetisation models to better serve their customers and increase revenue.

“Aria has the best solution for enterprise organisations that are saddled with slow and expensive legacy systems that can’t deploy recurring revenue initiatives quickly and efficiently,” said Lars Leckie, managing director at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. “Aria has the right executive team and the right product at the right time to extend and capture the lion’s share of success.”

Tom Dibble, president & CEO, Aria Systems.

“We are thrilled with the surging enterprise market adoption of Aria and the strategic focus our customers have to improve their recurring revenue businesses,” said Tom Dibble, president & CEO, Aria Systems. “Our investment partners provide us with their extensive experience in enterprise cloud, along with capital to provide a truly enterprise-grade level of support and service to our global customers. We look forward to building upon our record-setting 2015 and to establishing successful long-term partnerships with a new wave of customers.”

Major Industry Recognition

Evaluating the company’s platform are two recent reports from industry analyst firms MGI Research and Forrester Research. In naming Aria a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Subscription Billing Platforms, Q4 2015 Forrester Research stated, “the platform is well suited to support consumption/usage-based billing, multidimensional product/service structures, and complex B2B environments that have multilayered account structures and hierarchies.”

“With this latest infusion backed by an impressive investment roster, Aria is poised to be the category breakout in worldwide agile billing, whose total addressable market is expected to reach $14.8 billion by 2020,” said Andrew Dailey, managing director, MGI Research. “Satisfaction among Aria customers is high, and the company has progressively fortified its solutions to effectively and affordably scale within global enterprises across an array of industries.”

Record Achievement and Growth

Aria’s funding will further fuel marketing, sales and development efforts that extend the company’s record 2015 accomplishments.

Key 2015 achievements and milestones include:

• Increased bookings by 145% over 2014
• Processed over 200 million financial transactions
• Generated explosive growth in new verticals including automotive, media and healthcare services
• Maintained an industry-leading 97% enterprise retention rate across Global 2000 enterprise customers
• Grew revenue under management by several billions in the year with substantial exponential growth expected in 2016
• Marked a record number of enterprise “go lives” including implementations at Advanced Auto Parts, Audi, Constant Contact, IDC, Netgear, Pitney Bowes and others
• Launched Aria Revenue Analytics, first fully embedded analytics platform in a cloud billing solution
• Expanded the partner ecosystem with multiple system integrators building out Aria practices
• Named two new key executive appointments: David Wittenkamp, CFO and Andres Botero, CMO & SVP of marketing

What Customers Say about Aria 

“We are investing in streamlining our billing processes, enabling us to be even more agile and responsive in meeting our clients’ pricing needs,” said Sagheer Ahmed, global fraud and revenue assurance director, Experian. “We have been working with Aria for three years in some of our businesses and will be exploring Aria’s Cloud Billing and Active Monetisation Platform more widely across the enterprise.”

“The Aria billing and monetisation platform enables us to design and deliver superior experiences for both FreshBooks customers and our internal stakeholders,” said Mike McDerment, co-founder and CEO of FreshBooks, the leading accounting software choice for SMBs.

“Aria has proven it can handle the scale we need, and its dynamic product catalog provided a great way to support a wide variety of models, from high-volume transactional products to sophisticated and customised enterprise products,” said Cara Goodwin, director of purchases and subscriptions at LogMeIn, a worldwide SaaS leader.

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