VentureBeat

updated

SugarCRM, an open source customer relationship management (CRM) software company, has raised $20 million more in financing, led by New Enterprise Associates, bringing its total funding to $46 million.

This is a hyper-competitive sector, and we’ve written about how SugarCRM shrewdly has teamed up with NEA, where partner Scott Sandell had a front-row seat in watching the moves of competitor Salesforce.com.

The company says it will use the funding to help expand to Europe and Asia, among other things.

Existing investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Walden International also joined the round. The question is, why did NEA lead the round, instead of let another investor come in to independently set the value of the company, as is customary? NEA has been aggressive in the past, and may have wanted the deal to itself. It has also shown a tendency to place high values on companies, and so it may have pushed the valuation on Sugar so high that no other investor wanted to pay the same price. We don’t know.

Since 2004, SugarCRM has seen more than 4 million downloads of its CRM products, it says, along with 470 product extensions, 75 language translations, and more than 60,000 community members. It says it has 12,000 registered developers and a customer base of nearly 3,000 commercial accounts. These are big numbers, though we haven’t confirmed how many of these users and accounts are active. The company just issued a release, so we’ll try to follow up and see how they are doing against an array of other competitors.

In December, the company announced the release of Sugar 5.0, with an Ajax email client, multiple homepages for users, on-demand architecture and a module builder feature for non-technical users.

We profiled SugarCRM back in 2005. Chief executive John Roberts is a good salesman. Question is, will this company now be able to break into the big leagues?

Genius, which lets businesses track the behavior of customers visiting their Web site, has raised $19 million more in financing.

Genius lets a salesperson track who is visiting a page (see image at left), and jump in to have an IM chat with a customer who seems close to making a purchase on the site — to either help close the purchase or answer any questions the customer might have.

The financing round for the San Mateo, Calif. company was led by Accel Parters. Previous investors, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Emergence Capital and Walden International, also invested. The four-year-old company previously raised $15.1 million.

The company now says it has more than 400 corporate customers, up from 100 customers when we wrote about the company a year ago. It says it just closed a major account with British Telecom.

Chief executive David Thompson told us the company has focused on new features like email campaigns. In such a campaign, a salesperson can send out emails with links. When a potential customer clicks on a link and comes to the site, Genius lets the salesperson watch their clicking behavior.

Management teams at some companies (BT, for example) are now using the product to monitor how well email campaigns perform, how a web site is performing and how the salesforce is doing overall.

However, Genius will face more competition with its move into email. Competitors include Eloqua (coverage here), and for email, ExactTarget and Constant Contact.

The product is sold for $49 per user per month.

The Silicon Valley start-up Tilera has unveiled a powerful chip with 64 cores, or electronic brains that is getting widespread coverage today.

The Santa Clara, Calif. company’s product emerges after a decade of research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and improves performance by making use of a new way to connect its cores with a computer’s memory and improve the flow of data: It uses a mesh, or grid, of interconnected wires to line the cores to one another and in doing so avoids the traffic bottlenecks that can occur in multi-core processors.

The chips aren’t designed for PCs; rather they’re for video-processing hardware and networking devices. Tilera says it has about a dozen customers.

Tilera faces competition from Ambric, of Beaverton, Ore., which has a 344-processor chip based on a mesh design, and Stream Processors, of Sunnyvale, Calif., which has developed a chip with 80 specialized cores, called arithmetic logic units, arranged in 16 groups to allow data to move through the product at very high speed, Dow Jones notes (subscription required).

The company has raised $40 million from Bessemer Partners, Walden International and VTA, the venture arm of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. TSMC is manufacturing the chip.

A Mercury News story is here.
A CNET story is here.
Our past coverage of the company is here.