Phocas Software is an Australian cloud data analytics company that has recently raised AU$45M led by Ellerston Capital to accelerate its growth in the US and UK. Founded in 2008, the company specializes in developing business intelligence and analytics software that helps organizations gain better insights into their data.
In this article, we will look at the company’s history, mission and the recent financing round.
Overview of Phocas Software
Established in 2002, Phocas Software is a global provider of business intelligence software, whose vision is to enable every person in an organization to analyze performance quickly and easily. Our customers range from mid-market companies through global corporate organizations across multiple industries.
Phocas is an independent business intelligence software provider specializing in data discovery and real-time visibility to drive better decision-making. Our mission is to empower users with actionable insights based on their unique needs, transforming how they understand their performance. We are committed to enabling our customers to use their data more effectively and with ease by providing award-winning products that deliver results quickly and easily.
Our team of over 400 professionals serve our clients remotely from a mixture of regional offices in 38 countries worldwide, including North America, Australasia, Europe and Asia Pacific. Our employees are passionate about helping people make better decisions to abide by our creed “expand your horizons” – inspiring people to think bigger, move faster and explore new ways of working that get results faster than ever.
We believe that success is achieved through collaboration and knowledge sharing – principles that underpin how we work together as one company globally and how our industry leading solutions help customers increase business performance year after year.
Founding and Early History
Phocas Software was founded in 2011 by John McInnes and Chris Timm in Australia. They focused on creating cloud-based data analysis services, helping businesses to analyse their data more efficiently.
The two were passionate about allowing businesses to explore their data and make better informed decisions. They eventually raised AU$45M in 2020, driven by Ellerston Capital, to aid in fuelling growth across the US and UK.
Founding of Phocas Software in Australia
In September 2001, two expatriate Australian software engineers, John Mitchell and Jeff Alexander, founded Phocas Software in Queensland, Australia to create a revolutionary business intelligence platform to empower users. At the time, most decisions were informed by data stored in spreadsheets and manually collected reports due to ineffective and outdated business intelligence (BI) solutions.
Phocas was developed to answer this need for easy-to-use yet powerful BI technology that could quickly analyze data from all sources on an enterprise level. With minimal resources available during its launch, Phocas Software relied heavily on innovation and agility as it focused on developing its software as a service (SaaS) cloud-based tool that could easily be accessed anywhere in the world. The founders chose to launch the product in Australia due to its mature manufacturing industry with strong technical demand and understanding of BI technology at that time.
By 2004, the SaaS offering had increased in popularity nationally and internationally. It quickly achieved recognition within North American markets where established corporations began consolidating large amounts of data through Phocas’ self-service analytics solution. Over the next ten years, Phocas would experience rapid global expansion as more international customers sought their unique business intelligence solution that offered advanced reporting capabilities without complex infrastructures—driving decision-making processes of enterprises worldwide.
Early Growth and Expansion
Phocas Software was founded in 2001 by CEO Robert Lee and has since grown to become one of the leading business intelligence and analytics providers. The company is headquartered in Sydney, Australia, with offices throughout North America, Europe, and Africa. Phocas’ solutions are used in over 120 countries by over 5,000 customers of all sizes and industries.
In its early years, Phocas established itself as a leader in business intelligence for mid-market companies using its powerful reporting solutions to help companies make better decisions with data. To reach international markets, the company quickly began expanding its global operations. It opened regional offices in Dallas (2007) before opening regional sales teams across Europe (2009) followed by Canada (2011).
Phocas continued to expand their global presence and broadened their service offerings through organic product growth and strategic acquisitions. This included launching new data visualization capabilities (2017), acquiring MachineMetrics (2018), extending its cloud-based services offering with Compelon (2019), entering the enterprise segment via Knoa Software acquisition (2020).
Today, Phocas customers benefit from the same level of service regardless of where they are based or what size business they operate: from Financial Services firms processing millions of transactions per hour to SMEs exporting globally for the first time.
Australian cloud data analytics company Phocas Software raises AU$45M led by Ellerston Capital to accelerate its growth in the US and UK (Jeremy Horwitz/VentureBeat)
Australian cloud data analytics company Phocas Software recently announced that it has raised AU$45M led by Ellerston Capital to accelerate its growth in the US and UK.
This investment will enable the company to further expand its presence in those markets and increase its product offerings. The company has seen significant growth recently, both in Australia and abroad, and this additional funding will help it to continue its momentum.
Fundraising Round Led by Ellerston Capital
Phocas Software recently wrapped up its Series C fundraising round led by Ellerston Capital. Ellerston, an Australian investment firm, was joined by existing investors Craigs Investment Partners and Pathfinder Asset Management, raising the total venture funding for the business intelligence software provider to $38 million.
This most recent funding round sees Ellerston become a minority shareholder in Phocas with a 20% stake and marks their first investment in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) space. Furthermore, it strengthens their relationship with the company and provides additional confidence in the long-term success they are striving to achieve. With this fresh injection of capital into their organization, Phocas intends to continue making great strides towards becoming an indispensable tool for businesses helping them analyze their data more effectively and make better decisions.
This latest round of funds will accelerate product development, including expanding integrations and developing features to optimize data accuracy while simplifying time consuming tasks such as accessing reports from multiple data sources. The company also plans to widen its customer base within the international market, allowing Phocas to benefit from a larger customer base across more industries and providing more value for worldwide businesses.
In addition to these investments in product development and customer growth, Phocas’s freshly formed leadership team is also expecting more focus on hiring experienced SaaS talent to further strengthen their operations throughout 2021 and provide higher quality service for customers now and beyond.
Expansion into US and UK Markets
In 2007, Phocas Software entered the US and UK markets to empower business users with self-service intelligence that deliver organization-wide insights. Phocas helps businesses transform their culture and create a data-driven culture by making data available through an enterprise self-service tool. In addition, this system enabled the customers to easily build their own tailored KPIs along with trending analytics.
Since entering the US and UK markets, Phocas has added many key innovations to its core offering such as machine learning, workflow automation, performance scorecards and visual analytics. These new capabilities give customers even greater insight into how their business performs in real time.
In 2012 the company changed its name from Empire Software to Phocas Software to emphasize the crossover between data science and executive decision making that these solutions are renowned for delivering. The change was also made to reflect increasing global recognition of the company verSuite products as world class solutions that exceed customer expectations regarding functionality and performance.
After 13 years in business, Phocas solutions have been employed by over 3500 companies around Australasia, South Africa and Europe. They use its platform to drive better business decisions by accessing interactive business intelligence tools on any device – wherever required.
Future Plans
Following the successful AU$45M funding round led by Ellerston Capital, Phocas Software is now looking towards the future, outlining plans to expand its presence in the US and UK markets. With the funding in place, the Australian cloud data analytics company is gearing up to continue its growth and increase its market share in the two countries.
Let’s take a look at their upcoming plans.
Future Expansion Plans
Phocas Software is dedicated to delivering superior analytics and data solutions to customers worldwide. As we continue growing our business, we strive to create technologies transforming how companies view and use their data. In addition, our commitment is focused on creating an unbeatable customer experience by providing efficient, comprehensive solutions and services.
With this dedication in mind, our future expansion plans include extending our reach into new industries and global markets beyond the United States. We plan on entering new international markets while strengthening our presence in existing ones by delivering top-tier products, services and support in those regions. In addition, we continuously innovate with cutting-edge technology such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Ultimately, we hope these initiatives will lead us towards becoming a global leader in the enterprise software industry.
As we embark on these monumental endeavors, Phocas Software remains dedicated to providing customers with data-rich applications that turn customer insights into action – empowering businesses with smarter decisions for better outcomes.
Plans for Growth and Innovation
As Phocas Software grows, we have ambitious plans for growth and innovation. Our commitment to providing a thorough and comprehensive business intelligence solution that covers every area of a business — from sales to finance, operations to marketing — has been integral in helping us become an industry leader. In addition, we strive to create the best possible experience for our customers and take pride in the high quality product we provide them with.
We take great strides towards setting the standard for data analysis, visualization and reporting on modern data sets. We strive for excellence in our products by creating innovative solutions that incorporate powerful analytics, natural language processing and machine learning algorithms; all supported by intuitive user interfaces and ongoing customer support.
We have achieved success so far because of our dedication to putting customers first; ensuring their data is secure, their information is accurate and their insights are optimized to help make informed decisions quickly and easily. With that same commitment of ‘putting customers first’, we proudly introduce some new projects on which we are currently working:
- Phocas Insight Connect: a revolutionary cloud-based platform designed to provide businesses an efficient way of gathering data from multiple sources inside and outside the organization.
- The self-service developer environment: allowing users with coding experience the power to make immediate changes through Business Critical adjustments with just their voices or taps on keyboards instead of waiting days or weeks for changes made by a third party developer.
We remain committed to honing our skills to bring valuable insights directly into the hands of users so they can manage their business more effectively. As part of this commitment, Phocas Software will continue developing secure partnerships across industries who can benefit from greater access points into their organizations’ data structures. Through these partnerships, we increase user access points while crafting unique experiences personalized for each type of user experience across platforms – whether it be our users within an organization or consumers outside an organization using partner applications like Apple Siri® or Amazon Alexa® Voice Recognition Systems™ – which will help our customers succeed in this new era.
Tech expert fresh from the Australian Coast. Been in the tech industry more than 9 years, as part of a Business Growth Group. His out of office days are 100% for freestyle surfing and waves chasing.
