LiquidPlanner has reeled in $1 million in angel financing, cash that the Bellevue online project management and collaboration service hopes will drive it to profitability.
The deal marks the first investment for the Alliance of Angel's "side car fund," a new $4.3 million iniatitive supported by Madrona Venture Group and Trilogy Partners that's designed to provide matching funds to promising startups.
"We raised more than we expected to raise," said Chief Executive Charles Seybold, a former Expedia employee who launched LiquidPlanner about one year ago. Since then, the company has operated without much outside capital and has tried to keep things "lean," he said.
Seybold said they only formally started raising the capital about 45 days ago. "It was a bit of a nail biter to wait for first quarter results to come out to do our fundraising," said Seybold.
But he added that the business is doing well -- growing at about 10 percent month over month. LiquidPlanner's online service is used by about 200 organizations -- including Sandlot Games, X Space and Oracle -- to help them better plan and schedule internal projects.
With the economy still struggling, Seybold said that LiquidPlanner has been able to gain traction in part because "it became kind of cool to plan again."
Companies, he said, are looking to cut costs and more efficiently managing projects is one way to do it, he said.
Of course, there's no shortage of competition in the online project management arena. We've written recently about Seattle area companies such as Guppers, Kamune, Daptiv and Smartsheet, but other players include Basecamp and @ Task.
Seybold admitted that there's "a lot of noise" in the space. But he said that many competitors are Basecamp knock offs and don't offer the more heavy-duty planning capabilities such as task scheduling and time monitoring found in LiquidPlanner.
"We are sticking to our knitting and focusing on delivering great software," he said.
The company employs 10 people and plans to start "cautiously hiring" in the coming weeks.
"We are pretty conservative," said Seybold. "(Co-founder) Jason (Carlson) and I are both from the Midwest and we want to largely grow the company on its profits."
As part of the new investment, angel investor Geoff Entress has joined the company's board. The Bellingham angel group also participated.
The new capital should be more than enough to get the company to profitability, Seybold said.
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