By Tom Shea February 13, 2019
This is an exciting time for us at OneStream Software. We recently announcedincredible growth in 2018 AND our first external investment with KKR with a "unicorn" valuation. While these are both great accomplishments for our company, what I'm most proud of is how we did it.
Sustainable, Profitable Growth
We founded OneStream to be a sustainable business rather than a start-up. Our first year we focused on building our business one customer success at a time. As we grew we maintained that same level of dedication to customer success and sustainable, profitable growth. By taking this approach we have built up a significant customer base with a level of trust, loyalty and advocacy that is simply unmatched in our market. The momentum of that steady sustainable approach has taken off in recent years; with revenue growth of 500% over the last three years and sustained profitability we grow more convicted that customer success drives company success.
The Right Partner at the Right Time
From the start all the way through 2018 we've bootstrapped OneStream with no external investments at
all. But even for a profitable and fast-growing business there inevitably comes a time when external investment makes good business sense. As we approached the $100 million revenue mark, and started planning our journey towards the $500 million milestone, we decided it was the right time to bring in an outside investor. We were fortunate enough to have many parties interested in investing in OneStream. For us it came down to fit more than funding. All investors can provide funding, but we were looking for an investor that would also be a partner and a strategic advisor. A partner that takes a long-term approach to their investments, believes in our commitment to customer success, our vision, and in our leadership team. We found that partner in KKR. I think this excerpt from Dave Welsh's blog post sums it up perfectly.
"The experienced management team, innovative platform, incredibly loyal customer base, and huge market opportunity underscore why we're so excited to become the first outside investor in OneStream…One of our objectives investing in the technology growth equity space is to back companies that will become global leaders offering much-needed solutions in growing markets. We strongly believe OneStream is on that path and are thrilled to have the opportunity to invest in their future."
Successful firms like KKR don't invest in your past, they invest in your future. One of the things that was important to me in an investor was finding an investor that truly understands the power of our platform and believes, as we do, that it has the potential to truly disrupt the market.
Smart Phone Inspired
All three founders of OneStream, Bob Powers, Craig Colby and I, have each built our careers developing and selling Corporate Performance Management (CPM) solutions – and we believed strongly that the market-leaders' strategy of integrating multiple different products into CPM "suites" was outdated, flawed, and would not support the digital finance transformation that was on the horizon.
Our OneStream Intelligent Finance Platform was conceived, designed and developed from the start as a unified platform for the core CPM processes at the time – budgeting, planning, consolidation, reporting etc. More importantly we architected it to rapidly incorporate additional solutions without bolting on separate products or platform upgrades. If you need to go somewhere you can easily download Waze or Uber to your iPhone and use it. You don't have to upgrade iOS to use it, you don't wonder if it "knows" how to use iOS Location Services and Notifications or that installing it will "break" other apps on your phone.
We designed our platform to deliver that same kind of experience and level of confidence. New capabilities such as account reconciliations, capital planning, or people planning can be downloaded from our OneStream MarketPlace™, configured and deployed without any upgrade to the platform at all. This allows our customers to add new capabilities on their schedule with zero disruption and faster time to value. Not only can we bring new functionality and process automation to market faster via our OneStream MarketPlace, we can also do it to incorporate technologies such as Machine Learning (ML) into the platform.
The OneStream Intelligent Finance platform is designed for the long-term as an extensible platform to rapidly meet the changing needs of modern finance organizations. As the role of modern finance organizations continues to evolve, extensibility is critical to successful digital finance transformation.
"Smart Cloud" Extends Boundaries
As an engineer at heart, I know it is easy to get comfortable with a technology stack and consequently limit the potential of the software that you create. At OneStream, we were fortunate to be architecting our platform at a time when the "Smart Cloud" technologies were coming of age. When we say "Smart Cloud" we're referring to the programmable and infinitely-scalable compute infrastructure that Microsoft has delivered with Azure. The Azure cloud has inspired us to rethink what is possible with respect to system scalability and performance on the cloud. Our engineering teams are breaking new ground and "coding into the cloud" not just "installing on the cloud". We feel this is the secret to delivering great functionality and scalability in the cloud in a way that optimizes both performance and cost.
Join us for Splash 2019 in New Orleans or Madrid
A huge "thank you" to all of our employees, customers and partners who've been instrumental to OneStream's success to this point, but its just the beginning. With our new partner KKR we will continue to expand the capabilities of our platform, deliver new OneStream MarketPlace solutions, expand into new markets- all while maintaining our focus on delivering 100% customer success.
To learn more about our plans for the future, join us at our nextOneStream Splash conference.
