Q4bis Raises $6 Million in Venture Capital Funding

Published: July 30, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Business intelligence software maker Q4bis, which recently moved its headquarters from New Zealand to Irvine, California, to take on the North American market, announced last week that it has received $6 million in Series A venture capital funding from a group of investors led by TVC Capital.

Q4bis has over 200 customers worldwide using its Q4bis BI Suite today, including a number of companies that have back-end systems based on the i5/OS and OS/400 platform. However, the company's software runs on Microsoft's Windows operating system and uses its SQL Server 2005 database as its data store. Many i5/OS and OS/400 shops have data warehouses running on SQL Server, and have for years, because the platform is relatively inexpensive compared to the iSeries and System i platform.

Q4bis was founded in 1993 by Herbert Schoenek after he sold another tech company in Germany and moved to New Zealand. Q4bis still maintains development and sales operations in Auckland, but in 2003, when Schoenek wanted to get serious about moving into the North American market, he moved the company's headquarters to Irvine. Q4bis has development and sales operations in Irvine, Auckland, and Nuremburg, and also has offices in London, England, and St. Leonards, Australia. Schoenek is the company's chief executive officer.

According to Ross Morris, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Q4bis, TVC Capital was interested in Q4Bis because Schoenek was able to self-fund a business that attained over 200 midrange and enterprise customers spanning three geographic regions--a company that brings in multiple millions of dollars a year that did very little marketing and sales. (He was not at liberty to say how many millions or if the company was profitable.) The reason this worked, according to Morris, is that Q4bis BI Suite is a good product. And that is why TVC Capital wants to invest in the growth of Q4bis.

"The financial resources we are acquiring from our partnership with TVC Capital will enable us to continue our global growth in the expanding business intelligence markets in the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific," said Schoenek in a statement. "We will use this capital to ensure we continue to enhance our solutions to the midrange market where the fastest growth is occurring for decision support products running on the Microsoft SQL database."

Specifically, Morris says that the money will be used to ramp up the marketing message for the products, in building a direct sales force and a partner channel for indirect sales, and getting Web 2.0-style collaboration capabilities built into the Q4bis BI Suite.

Steve Hamerslag and Jeb Spencer, both general partners of TVC Capital, will join the Q4bis board of directors as part of the $6 million in first-round venture capital funding. TVC Capital is based in San Diego, and typically invests in companies with sales in the range of $3 million to $50 million, and they are usually profitable.

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