Alibaba and Twitter backer makes first-ever India bet

Growth-stage venture capital and private equity firm Insight Venture Partners, an investor in several high-profile software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies like Shopify, NewRelic, and Wix, today revealed its first investment in India: subscription billing software-maker Chargebee.

The New York-based investor led Chargebee’s $18 million series C round of funding, in which existing investors Accel Partners and Tiger Global Management participated. Insight, which has raised over $18 billion in capital, has invested in more than 300 companies worldwide, including Hootsuite, Flipboard, Twitter, JD, and Alibaba. Chennai-based Chargebee caught its eye at the SaaStr conference in San Francisco a year ago.

Analysts from Insight referred a few of their portfolio companies as prospective customers for Chargebee. “They used our product, were happy with it, and that was a good way for the fund to validate us,” Krish Subramanian, co-founder and CEO of Chargebee, tells Tech in Asia.

“As a firm, we are long on recurring revenue businesses. Chargebee is poised to capitalize on this trend,” Harley Miller, vice president at Insight, who will be joining the Chargebee board, said in a press announcement.

While the earlier funding rounds for Chargebee were more of a bet on the subscription billing market and the founders, the latest is based on the company’s growth metrics, Subramanian shares. That’s something he and his co-founders – Rajaraman Santhanam, K.P. Saravanan, and Thiyagarajan T. – are proud of.

Founded in 2011, Chargebee’s software makes implementing subscription billing and recurring payments easier for small and medium-sized businesses (SMB). It claims to have over 7,000 customers in 53 countries.

This is an excerpt from the article published on TechInAisa