Of all the entrepreneurs who took the stage at this month’s Best Ottawa Business Awards, probably none had a bigger grin than FileFacets co-founder Chris Perram.
It’s not hard to figure out why.
The Kanata South startup – which makes software that helps clients automatically locate, sort through and categorize reams of business files to make data easier to analyze and manage – scored #NextBigThingOTT honours as one of the capital’s companies to watch during the annual business gala.
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Its month got even better on Tuesday, when FileFacets announced it has landed $4 million in series-A financing. The round is being led by Kanata’s Celtic House Venture Partners with additional participation from Ottawa-based Wesley Clover International and GCI Ventures out of Toronto.
All in all, it’s been a November to remember for the upstart firm.
“It’s pretty exciting right now,” Mr. Perram said in an interview with OBJ on Tuesday afternoon, adding there will be more “big announcements” coming down the pipe in the next few weeks. “We have pretty grand plans.”
Those plans include expanding the firm’s customer base in the United States, Europe and Australasia as part of its drive to become a $100-million company within five years.
Mr. Perram said the latest funding will go towards beefing up the 25-person firm’s sales and marketing staff in North America and around the world. It’s all part of a shift from a direct sales model to a channel sales strategy in which the company markets its products to manufacturers of due-diligence and enterprise content management software “so we’re onboarding 30 customers a month instead of three,” he explained.
“It’s a constant recruiting effort right now,” Mr. Perram said, noting the firm has doubled its headcount in the last year while posting double-digit month-over-month growth in recurring revenues.
Hiring is a challenge for just about all tech startups these days, he conceded, but he said his company has been fortunate to win over some highly sought-after recruits in its development and marketing departments.
“We’ve got a bit of a cool vibe going on,” he said.
FileFacets now has sales staff south of the border in Denver, San Diego and Washington, D.C., as well as an office in Vancouver, an expansion that has produced “incredible results,” Mr. Perram said. The firm is gearing up to take on the European market and is also making inroads in Asia, Australia and New Zealand, he said.
While he wouldn’t reveal specific revenue figures, Mr. Perram said the company – which graduated from Kanata’s L-Spark accelerator in June – is growing even faster than he’d expected.
“Put it this way – the investors are happy,” he said.
They certainly sounded that way in Tuesday’s announcement.
“FileFacets has done an amazing job building their technology platform to deliver a single, turn-key solution to help solve a major piece in the data migration puzzle,” David Adderley, partner at Celtic House Venture Partners, said in a statement. “We look forward to working with Chris and his team on their continued growth and success.”
Mr. Perram praised his mentors at L-Spark for keeping the firm on the “straight and narrow” during its transformation into a fast-growing software-as-a-service enterprise.
“We wouldn’t be here today without having gone through that exercise,” he said.
