Friday, October 17, 2008

Kalido aims cash at growth to profitability

By Christopher Calnan

Software maker Kalido Inc. recently closed on a $5 million extension to a $10 million Series D round of funding that company officials plan to use to fuel growth to profitability next year.

CEO Bill Hewitt said he expects the company’s 2008 revenue to grow 30 percent versus last year by shifting Kalido’s focus from enterprise infrastructure projects to smaller projects that customers typically develop internally.

The company has attracted seven investors, including Waltham-based venture capital firms Matrix Partners and Atlas Venture, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The Series D financing, which closed in late September, increased the total venture capital Kalido has raised to $63.5 million.

The SEC filing also lists London-based Balderton Capital as a Kalido investor.

Kalido doesn’t disclose annual revenue figures. Last month, the company introduced a new subscription-based business-intelligence product targeting midsize companies. The product, with prices starting at $5,000 per month, is designed to undercut BI industry giants such as France’s Business Objects SA, which was acquired by SAP AG early this year, and Canada’s Cognos Inc. (with U.S. offices in Burlington and which was acquired by IBM Corp. early this year) and North Carolina’s SAS Institute Inc.

BI software extracts data so users can make better business decisions based on trends. Last year, the BI market reached $4.9 billion globally, a 10.5 percent increase over 2006, according to Gartner Inc.

Kalido’s largest areas of growth have come from customers operating in the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, Hewitt said. The recent extension financing was completed instead of a new round of funding to avoid the additional time it would take to reach new terms on the deal, he said.

Kalido was spun out of data modeling research by the Royal Dutch/Shell Group in 2003 with a $20 million investment from Atlas and Benchmark Capital, a venture capital firm that operates offices in California and Israel.