Tech City's Huddle secures third round of funding

$24m investment to take the company to 'billion dollar' IPO

Huddle, the Tech City collaborative cloud start-up, has secured a third round of venture funding. The $24m (£15.3m) investment is intended to take it either to a public share offering – or acquisition.

"Our objective is to be a billion-dollar business, ‘IPOing' in the next two or three years," said Huddle CEO and co-founder Alastair Mitchell, speaking exclusively to Computing.

The company's revenues tripled in the last financial year and the funding is required to help the firm keep up with demand.

"Previous rounds were used to help build out the technology. This round will be used to support our growth. We have customers asking us for 85,000 seats in one go – that's a big ‘step change' to our business."

The subscription-based cloud model works out at about £15 per user, per month, he adds.

The financing was led by Jafco Ventures, with participation from DAG Ventures and existing investors Matrix Partners and Eden Ventures. Subrah Iyar, the founder of WebEx, and experienced venture investor Herb Madan also participated in the round. The company has now raised $40m (£25.55m) in total.

The company pitches Huddle as a lower-cost, cloud-based alternative to Microsoft SharePoint.

"Huddle is a cloud-based platform that enables people in business to share content and to work together at the same time," said Mitchell. "You can work on one thing in one language on your laptop; I might get the same content on my iPhone, make a change in a different language and we are still working on the same piece of content."

The company was founded in 2007 and is based in London and New York. Customers include fast-moving consumer goods maker Procter & Gamble, drinks company Diageo, car maker Kia, and pharmaceutical giant Merck.