Visier Scores $15 Million in New Funds

Visier, a workforce analytics and planning solutions company that previously secured $9 million in investments, has gained an additional $15 million from investors. The Series B round was led by equity investor Summit Partners. Foundation Capital, which provided $6 million during the Series A, also contributed to the new round of funds. "Today Visier has been in the market for about 18 months," John Schwarz, co-founder and CEO of Visier, told Benzinga. "…The company is built around the idea that delivering [our solutions] to the end user will ultimately displace the way that organizations use business intelligence today." Schwarz started Visier after serving as the CEO of Business Objects SA, which was acquired by SAP SAP in 2007. His new firm may be young, but it has already acquired an impressive list of customers, including Hyatt Hotels H, ConAgra Foods CAG and Alaska Communications ALSK. Visier also serves the Commonwealth Bank of Australia CBAUF, the largest bank in the nation. While an impressive customer list could be worth millions of dollars to prospective investors, Schwarz said that Visier's investors primarily wanted three different things. "First they're looking for a team they can trust," he said. "We've built a real first-class team of people that have had years and years of history building applications, analytics and business intelligence solutions. "Secondly they are looking for a company that has a target market that was big enough to be interesting. Clearly we do. There is in excess of $10 billion spent annually on BI tools and another $20 billion spent annually on services that are used to make the BI tools useful. "The third thing they're looking for is [proof that the] design we had made actually works. With two dozen customers, that clearly is a sufficient key point that we had, in fact, delivered [a solution] that is working really well." Thus far, Visier has only had the resources to handle a small fraction of the potential customers it could be serving. Schwarz said that the firm plans to use its new funds to acquire more of those customers and to become more of an international firm. "We have a development team up in Vancouver that is absolutely first-class," said Schwarz. "They're the best set of business intelligence technologists the world has seen. But it's a very limited team in terms of the size and scope and the things it can do. We have thus far targeted only HR as our end user but there are many others who have the same problems [we could solve] if we had additional resources." Visier is not yet profitable, but Schwarz has high hopes for the future. "Five years from now, I would expect that the company will be a $100 million-plus revenue-sized business," he said. "We will have at least another business domain that we have delivered on, maybe two. "We will be competing heavily with the existing service providers that are building custom-built business intelligence solutions and we'll be a significant, disruptive force in the business intelligence market as well." Louis Bedigian is the Senior Tech Analyst and Features Writer of Benzinga. You can reach him at 248-636-1322 or louis(at)benzingapro(dot)com. Follow him @LouisBedigianBZ