SlideRocket Raises $5 Million in Series B Funding and Announces New CEO
San Francisco, CA - July 21, 2009 - SlideRocket, the first and only complete online presentation solution, today announced it received $5 million in Series B funding and that Chuck Dietrich, a former General Manager & Vice President at salesforce.com, has joined the company as CEO. The financing round was led by Azure Capital Partners; General Partner Ray Carey will take a board seat with the company. Other investors include Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, which led SlideRocket’s Series A funding. Also announced today, SlideRocket Co-Founder Mitch Grasso will assume the role of Chief Technology Officer.
Business needs are changing and companies are adapting by conducting business online in new and collaborative ways. Organizations like salesforce.com and Twitter have fundamentally changed the workplace and redefined how companies interact with their customers. Since launching its cloud-based presentation application as a public beta in November of 2008, SlideRocket has successfully capitalized on this trend by innovating and delivering a unique service that raises the bar for the way people create, manage and deliver presentations. The Series B funding will help SlideRocket accelerate its already considerable growth trajectory, add headcount and build on the company’s recent successes.
Industry-veteran Dietrich brings more than a dozen years of leadership experience to SlideRocket. He comes to SlideRocket from salesforce.com where he was most recently General Manager & Vice President, Salesforce Mobile, which mobilizes Salesforce CRM, custom, and Force.com applications so that mobile professionals are always connected to their critical information. Dietrich joined salesforce.com in 2000 and held a variety of roles including building salesforce.com's consulting, marketing and product alliances programs as well as building out foreign distribution.
“We live online, yet presentations - the most common sales and marketing tools - are still limited by the confines of 20-year old unconnected desktop software," said Chuck Dietrich, CEO, SlideRocket. "SlideRocket has rewritten the rules and represents a revolution in presentations and collaboration. SlideRocket allows customers to create rich and dynamic slides that can be shared, managed and monitored online. It improves the way businesses communicate and engage customers.”
"After a long time of searching the collaboration and Software-as-a-Service market for a great company to invest in, we found SlideRocket," said Ray Carey, General Partner, Azure Capital Partners. "SlideRocket is a solid company with a compelling vision around transforming traditional static content into dynamic trackable online presentations that can be embedded or shared live or asynchronously. As these markets continue to expand SlideRocket is poised with new financing and management to take full advantage of this growing opportunity and we are happy to join them in doing so."
SlideRocket’s complete and integrated presentation platform revolutionizes what can be done with presentations. Companies no longer need to accept the limitations of client-based software like PowerPoint. Finally, there is an innovative, cloud-based service where companies can easily create, manage, share, and measure stunning presentations both within and beyond the walls of their business. SlideRocket benefits include:
- Create: With state of the art importing capabilities and authoring tools as well as unique asset management capabilities, professional presentations are simple to develop and guaranteed to impress;
- Manage: Groundbreaking presentation management allows users to maintain easy-to-access libraries of assets (photos, music), slides and presentations for reference and team use;
- Share: Collaborate on authoring and extend viewing to your customers with one-to-many communications, both online and offline; and
- Measure: Get real-time feedback on who is viewing your content and which slides are of most interest, and gain an understanding of how and why your presentations are succeeding.
With professional authoring tools, intelligent asset management, market leading analytics and the SlideRocket Marketplace, SlideRocket combines everything needed to deliver great presentations into a single platform. Sales, marketing, design, and more can create and collaborate with colleagues, integrate dynamic data, and share presentations securely online or offline, with consistent results every time.
"SlideRocket offers all the features we need for our marketing and business development team, including statistics, a user friendly interface and it always looks so professional. The web-based platform allows us to work on presentations anytime, anywhere and to share the content with our customers in advance of most deadlines," said Stephanie Valois, Conceptum International, an award winning interior design firm based in Montreal. "SlideRocket makes it so simple to connect directly with prospects that within just one month of using it, we signed four new customer contracts."
About Azure
Azure Capital Partners is a venture capital firm with over $650 million under management, headquartered in San Francisco, California. The firm’s goals are to identify, invest in and help build early stage information technology companies that are at the forefront of a transformative opportunity for growth. Azure’s partners have a long track record of identifying and helping to build some of the most successful companies in communications, consumer, enterprise and Internet technology segments. The team’s proven methodology and primary research enable Azure to identify companies in attractive markets whose business models provide sustainable competitive advantage. For more information, visit www.azurecap.com.
About Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
Hummer Winblad Venture Partners was created in 1989 as the first venture capital firm focused exclusively on software. As the software industry grew from PC software to enterprise computing to Internet applications, Hummer Winblad has been at the forefront – funding the entrepreneurs and the ideas that helped define these markets. The firm’s goal is to provide the capital, experience and vision that will enable its companies to become leaders in this new software economy. For more information on Hummer Winblad, visit www.humwin.com.
About SlideRocket
SlideRocket reinvents presentations by bringing big ideas to life, engaging audiences and driving business. The platform promotes influential story telling through interactive capabilities like audio, rich media and instant feedback that elevate meetings, regardless of time or location. In addition, the measurement analytics provide dynamic sales tools and unmatched customer insight. With SlideRocket you can quickly and easily create and deliver stunning presentations with quantifiable results. For more information, please visit www.sliderocket.com.
About VMware
VMware delivers virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions that enable IT organizations to energize businesses of all sizes. With the industry leading virtualization platform – VMware vSphere® – customers rely on VMware to reduce capital and operating expenses, improve agility, ensure business continuity, strengthen security and go green. With 2010 revenues of $2.9 billion, more than 250,000 customers and 25,000 partners, VMware is the leader in virtualization, which consistently ranks as a top priority among CIOs. VMware is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the world and can be found online at www.vmware.com.
Media Contact
Perrin Dent
Borders + Gratehouse for SlideRocket
(415) 963-4174
