Zuora – A savior for large enterprises to help with their billing systems.
Zuora is an American enterprise software company that develops software for businesses to manage their subscription-based services. When the company was founded, its main goal was to assist large enterprises with a proper billing system. Zuora provides a cloud-based billing platform that is designed to automate several features like recurring billing, collections, revenue recognition, subscription metrics, etc. Zuora is a publicly-traded company that is currently headquartered in Redwood Shores, California. It has more than 1,200 employees working under Tien Tzuo, CEO of the company.
About Zuora
Zuora was founded in 2007 in a small office at Mountain View, California. The founders of the company are K.V. Rao, Cheng Zuo, and Tien Tzuo. They both had industry experience as they spent several years working at WebEx and salesforce.com. Zuora, today, has become a leading company in the subscription economy industry as its cloud-based platform automates all subscription order-to-revenue operations for its clients.
The company went public in 2018 and got listed on New York Stock Exchange. The same year it established a partnership with maximum automobile manufacturing giants. Recently, Zuora was named one of the best workplaces by Glassdoor (2018) and became Innovator of the Year (2019) by the San Mateo County Economic Development Association.
History of the Company
In 2007, the three founders established Zuora to help enterprise companies in the 21st century with their real-time billing platform. Before founding Zuora, Roa and Zou were engineers at WebEx while Tzuo was an executive at Salesforce. They named the company after their surnames (combination of three surnames) and launched their first flagship product in 2008. In 2008 they launched two products, Z-billing and Z-Force. The latter one was the first billing solution of the company fully integrated with Salesforce CRM.
Expansion
Zuora attracted investors from the beginning and hence it was able to raise lucrative funding from many famous investors. This helped Zuora expand in international markets in a short time. In 2010, the company expanded to Europe, and the next year it made it into the OnDemand Top 100 Private Companies list. It was also featured in VentureWire’s FASTech 50 list and JMP Hot 100 Best Privately Held Software Companies.
In 2012 the company expanded to the Australian market and the next year it celebrated its 50th consecutive product release. In 2015, Zuora opened eight new offices worldwide and also entered the Japanese market, and became a total team of 500 employees. It also launched subscribed magazine and bagged the best technology innovation award from Ventana Research. 2016 was an eventful year for Zuora as it launched subscribed podcasts, featured on Forbes 100 Best Cloud Companies, Tzuo named E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year, crossed $40 billion invoice transaction volume, etc. This year Zuora also launched the Subscription Economy Index, a product that tracks revenue growth of subscription businesses.
By 2017, Zuora successfully landed 900 customers and released its 100th product since it was launched. Ken Goldman, CFO of Yahoo, joined Zuora’s board and the company also opened a new data center in Germany. Recently, Zuora has brought many experienced new members into the team like Robbie Traube (former Adobe executive) as Chief Revenue Officer and Todd McElhatton (former employee of SAP) as Chief Financial Officer.
Funding
Zuora successfully led its first round of funding (Series A) on the year that it was founded. It raised $6 million in Series A funding and it was led by Benchmark Capital and Marc Benioff. In September 2008, the Series B funding was led by Shasta Ventures where the company raised $15 million followed by $20 million in October 2010. By 2015 Zuora already conducted a Series F funding round and raised a total amount of $250 million. Major investors include Redpoint Ventures, Greylock Partners, Shasta Ventures, Index Ventures, Vulcan Capital, etc.
Tien Tzuo – Co-founder and CEO of Zuora
Tien Tzuo is a famous American tech entrepreneur who co-founded Zuora. He is currently the CEO of the company and was previously the Chief Strategy Officer of Salesforce. Tzuo was born in Taiwan and moved to Brooklyn when he was very young. He completed his studies at Cornell University and worked at Oracle Corporation for six years.
Annasha Dey is an NIT student, who apart from studying engineering is also a content writer. She has a great interest in photography, writing, reading novels, and travelling as well. She is a foodie who loves socializing and hanging out with her friends. She is also a trained Kathak dancer and a big fashion enthusiast. Dey also loves watching TV series, which includes F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and Big Bang Theory. To be a better writer she prefers to read more