04/17/2007

Cordys Holding B.V., provider of business process management suite (BPMS) enterprise software, announced today the successful completion of an $80 million (Euro 60 million) equity financing.

ebizQ received the following details:

Argonaut Private Equity led the round with an investment of $67 million, giving Argonaut a significant minority stake in the company. Jan Baan, founder and majority shareholder of Cordys, also participated. Today’s announcement represents the single largest round of funding for an independent, private BPMS vendor and points to the uniqueness of Cordys' technology in a rapidly growing BPMS software market. The BPMS market is predicted by Gartner Dataquest to be a $1 billion global market by end of 2007 and growing to $2.6 billion by 2011. The funds will predominantly be used to expand Cordys’ operations in the United States, Cordys Inc., a wholly owned North American subsidiary.

“Cordys is an emerging BPMS player recently noted by Gartner as one of five BPMS vendors to watch in 2007. As this is the first U.S. investment in Cordys, today’s announcement signals significant commitment to our U.S. go-to-market strategy, validates our ambitious vision and the staying power of the company, and demonstrates the confidence of the investors in our technology and team. We are delighted to have Argonaut as our partner and look forward to changing the rules of the BPMS market in 2007,” said Loek van den Boog, CEO of Cordys.

Jan Baan, founder and chairman of Cordys, explained, “This investment validates the company’s potential of becoming a global market leader in the BPMS space, an ambition Theodoor van Donge, our CTO, and I have had since founding the company in 2001.” Mr. Baan has been a software entrepreneur since 1978 when he founded Baan Software. Baan Software is recognized as a pioneer in enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, becoming one of the largest and fastest-growing software companies in the world by the mid-1990s. Mr. Baan’s early investments in Top-Tier (acquired by SAP), WebEx (acquired by Cisco) and other software companies have proven him to be a visionary with a keen sense of identifying and leveraging disruptive technologies. ”Cordys represents an entirely new class of enterprise software, one that leverages rather than rips-and-replaces value from existing enterprise technology investments. Cordys has built a product like none other in the BPMS and SaaS arena that dramatically reduces the cost and time involved in automating, deploying and optimizing critical business processes. This team has a proven track record of building great companies, so we look forward to partnering with Jan and his team in the years ahead,” said Jason Martin, Managing Director of Argonaut Private Equity, who has also joined the board of directors of Cordys Holding. BPMSs are the next-generation of BPM software. BPMSs pull together a broader set of tools to provide end-to-end lifecycle support of the business process all within a single model that is shared by all its enabling technologies. Because Cordys' innovative BPMS technology is built on an integrated service-oriented architecture (SOA), the gap between business analysts and IT teams is bridged and the time and cost of development and change is reduced dramatically. Enterprises are creating more "agile" businesses using BPMSs - in many cases automating tedious manual processes such as purchase order systems and customer service systems.

Cordys’ Growing U.S. Presence

Cordys also announced today the establishment of its new U.S. headquarters in San Jose, CA. This announcement comes on the heels of recent high-profile appointments to Cordys’ U.S. executive team. Cordys brings to the U.S. market three decades of experience by its senior management team in software development, integration and process optimization; extensive investments in R&D; and a track record of worldwide deployments with such respected organizations as AXA Insurance, De Amersfoortse, ABN AMRO Insurance (a joint venture between Delta Lloyd Group and ABN AMRO Bank) and Ertan Hydropowered Development Corporation. Cordys has attracted a global network of alliances with Cap Gemini, GT Software, Ordina and SOA Software. Cordys was recently named a 2007 Red Herring 100 Europe finalist.