Varicent secures $35M, second only to Facebook in IT funding for this quarter

Toronto-based Varicent Software, maker of software for sales performance management (SPM in industry jargon), has closed an impressive $35 million round of funding led by San Francisco-based FTV Capital. FTV also has an office in New York. Also participating are RBC Venture Partners, the Royal Bank of Canada’s investment arm. Edgestone Capital in Toronto also got in on the round.
The deal is the second largest privately funded IT investment so far this quarter, according to Dow Jones VentureSource.
Varicent has been around since 2003. This is the company’s C round of investment. The first round was led by Edgestone, the second by RBC, for a total of $15M in prior investment.
Varicent’s software is aimed at making it easy for businesses to model new business plans, and track sales plans with bonuses and other variable compensation. According to Gartner, 93 percent of companies still use some sort of home-grown system to track sales plans. Besides the IT costs, it wastes salespeople’s energy re-learning systems from job to job. Companies like Varicent and competitor Callidus aim to replace in-house software with more powerful, more standardized and yet also more flexible tools.
Mark Towne at medical equipment maker Smith & Nephew said in a prepared statement that they had two goals when shopping for sales performance management tools:
“The first was to find a solution that would allow us to quickly model new plans in order to keep up with the ever changing requirement of our business.”
“The second goal was to select a sales performance management platform that our many divisions can standardize on, making our processes and procedures uniform across the business. Varicent SPM was selected based on their ability to provide us the speed, flexibility and visibility for our sales compensation across all of our business units.”
Customers include Waste Management, Convoy Financial Group, Sherwin-Williams, Manpower, Autodesk, Getty Images, Starwood Hotels, Sun Hung Kai Financial, and many others.