Bellevue-based Acumatica takes to the cloud to provide businesses with business-planning software as it competes in a crowded field.
What: Acumatica, a Bellevue-based builder of business-planning software accessed via the Web.
Who: CEO Jon Roskill, a former Microsoft executive, who joined the company in 2014.
Corporate relatives: Acumatica is among the companies founded by Russia-born, Singaporean serial entrepreneur Serguei Beloussov. Acumatica’s corporate siblings include Renton’s Parallels, whose best-known product is an application that lets Mac users run a Windows desktop, and Acronis, a Swiss data backup and recovery business.
Business management: Acumatica makes “enterprise resource planning” (ERP) software, a category of tools for planning and managing business functions like a company’s order book, manufacturing process, inventory, and Web sales.
Small and midsize niche: The crowded ERP market is dominated by Germany’s SAP and Oracle. Microsoft sells its own line of Dynamics software, and there are dozens of smaller competitors. “We’re very focused on midmarket customers,” Roskill says. That means businesses of up to 500 people, with revenue between $5 million and $500 million. Clients include Seattle outdoors-education nonprofit The Mountaineers and Renton-based tool distributor Wilmar.
Funding: Founded in 2008, Acumatica most recently sought funding from investors in 2014, closing a $13.4 million investment round that November. Roskill says the company, which isn’t profitable yet, is starting to plan another round of fundraising.
Global footprint:Acumatica’s Bellevue headquarters is home to 36 employees, mainly in executive, sales and marketing functions. The rest of the company’s nearly 150 employees are spread among a software-development office in Moscow, as well as offices in Singapore, Columbus, Ohio and Montreal.
Local ties: Acumatica’s technology is built on Microsoft’s software framework and plugs in to a variety of the Redmond company’s tools, including Office 365 and Power BI. Acumatica’s software itself runs on servers operated by Amazon Web Services.
Cloud city: “That’s the benefit of being here in Bellevue,” Roskill says. “I’ve got Microsoft to the east, Amazon to the west, and the other [cloud-computing] player who’s accelerating, Google, three miles to the north in Kirkland. We want to be a bit of a Switzerland and take advantage of whatever technology we can from these companies.”
— Matt Day