Zuora Receives $115 Million Investment as Subscription Economy Goes Mainstream

FOSTER CITY, CA--(Marketwired - Mar 11, 2015) - Today's $115 million funding announcement from Zuora underscores the significant shift all companies are making toward subscription business models. The latest funding round brings the total amount of capital raised by Zuora to $250 million. New investors include public-market investors Wellington Management Company LLP and Blackrock Inc., as well as PremjiInvest and Passport Capital. They join existing investors Benchmark Capital, Greylock Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Index Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Vulcan Capital, Next World Capital, Dave Duffield, co-founder and chairman of the board of Workday; and Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com -- all of whom participated in this latest funding round.

Zuora is one of the world's fastest-growing software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies. Its relationship business management (RBM) platform allows companies to manage the entire lifecycle of the subscriber, including customer acquisition, recurring billing and payments, revenue recognition, and subscription metrics. With this new investment, Zuora will continue its global expansion into new geographies and vertical markets, expand its team with world-class sales, engineering and marketing personnel, and fuel continued research and development activities.

"The Subscription Economy is permeating every industry -- entertainment, technology, healthcare, manufacturing with IoT, consumer products, everything," said Tien Tzuo, Zuora co-founder and CEO. "Customers are now subscribers, and the new way to acquire, bill, and nurture customers is through monetizing subscriber relationships."

Tzuo continued, "Our funding partners understand that this shift is creating a multibillion dollar opportunity for a new category of software that sits between traditional CRM and ERP. The lead investors, including Blackrock and Passport Capital, bring strategic experience to help Zuora meet the enormous opportunity in front of us." 

Mainstream Market Traction
Since its founding in 2007, Zuora has correctly predicted the shift toward subscription-based business models and a transformation in the way business is transacted: from buying products to subscribing to services. Companies like salesforce.com, Amazon, Netflix, and Box were the vanguard of the subscription economy, but the story is now far broader and deeper, and relevant to nearly every industry.