With $18 Mn Funding Led By Insight Venture, Chargebee Aims To Break-even Profitability Soon

Chennai-based subscription management and recurring billing solutions startup Chargebee has raised $18 Mn growth capital from New York-based Insight Venture Partners.

The Series C funding round also saw participation from existing investors Accel Partners and Tiger Global Management. This funding will help Chargebee expand globally and improve proximity to customer locations. The capital will be used for increased investments in product, sales marketing, and growth initiatives.

Harley Miller, Vice President at Insight Venture Partners, will also join Chargebee’s board.

With this round, Chargebee has netted total investment of $24.7 Mn. Earlier in March 2015, the startup had raised $5 Mn in Series B round offunding to set up satellite offices in the US, UK and Australia.

“Since our last investment, we’ve grown from a 37 member team based in India, to a 135+ member global team that’s expanded into Silicon Valley. We now support 7,000+ customers in 50+ countries and have added support for payment gateways such as GoCardless, Adyen, Apple Pay, Chase Paymentech and others, to our growing list of gateway partnerships,” said Krish Subramanian, founder, Chargebee, in an email interaction with Inc42.

ChargeBee was founded by Rajaraman S, Thiyagarajan T, KP Saravanan and Krish Subramanian in 2011. It focuses on helping startups, and particularly those in the Saas space, get more from their billing subscriptions. It primarily operates in the small and medium business Saas space.

The startup offers a payment gateway agnostic subscription billing solution, complementing gateways like Stripe, Braintree, PayPal, Adyen and many others. Chargebee powers the recurring revenue engines of both B2B and B2C services across various industry verticals like SaaS, Digital Media, eCommerce, and IoT.

“We help our customers launch their business and grow into new countries, without having to worry about compliance, tax rules, language, currency, and even new revenue models. We take a lot of pride in remaining behind the scenes while powering our customer’s businesses. We want to be the AWS of Subscription Billing.” added Krish.

He further shared that the company’s long term bet lies in the increasing shift towards the subscription business model, with many existing and new products now being sold as subscriptions. The focus is to keep the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) very low for its customers by having a product that does not require a lot of professional services to implement, and at the same time delivers on the promise of deep last mile integrations.

“Just like how businesses don’t build their own CRM / Helpdesk, we believe that businesses don’t need to build their own billing systems. Our near future efforts are aligned towards realising this potential. We’re close to break-even profitability. We’ve scaled our customers’ revenues to a point where it’s getting closer to the billion-dollar mark. Our aim is to continue building the modern billing system, for modern business users in subscription businesses,” he added.

According to a March 2016 report by Google and Accel Partners India, this space is expected to grow to at least $76 Bn by 2020, from levels of roughly $24 Bn in 2015. The latest funding round, will certainly help Chargebee push its efforts towards achieving profitability in near future.

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