Tuesday, March 24, 2009

FirstBest gets second round worth $6M

By Galen Moore

FirstBest Systems Inc. has closed a second round of funding in the amount of $6 million. Boston-based Flybridge Capital Partners returned to lead the round with fellow return investor Brookstone Partners, a New York-based private equity firm. A third Series A investor, NextStage LLC, also returned to participate in the B round, which brought total investment to $13 million in FirstBest, a Bedford-based maker of underwriting management system software for the insurance industry.

Flybridge general partner Chip Hazard said FirstBest’s success with early customers has proven market demand, scalability and value proposition for its product, a software that automates workflow and applies business intelligence analytics to the underwriting decision-making process. The next step for the company will be to hire sales and marketing staff to expand the business, he said.

“The team here at the company has executed extremely well. They’re ahead of all the plans they outlined for us when we invested in the first round,” Hazard said. “The hope is really to build on the company’s initial success and drive the business forward from a sales and marketing perspective more than a development perspective,” he added.

FirstBest was founded in 2006 by CEO John Belizaire, CTO Julian Pelenur and COO Joseph Pilkerton. All three were co-founders at The Theory Center, a Boston-based developer of reusable Java components bought by BEA Systems Inc. in 1999 for $100 million in stock and cash.

Flybridge, formerly associated with IDG Ventures, spun off an independent fund and renamed itself last March. FirstBest was originally an IDG Ventures Boston investment.