ValueBlue founder Wilko Visser | Image credit: ValueBlue
Utrecht-based ValueBlue, a provider of SaaS solutions in the digital transformation market, announced on Tuesday that it has raised $11M (approx €9.66M) in its Series B round of funding.
The round was led by Octopus Ventures and Newion Partners. ABN AMRO also participated in the round by providing additional growth funding.
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Paul Davidson of Octopus Ventures says, “Organisations now recognise the benefits of more closely aligning business strategy with IT strategy as a key enabler of driving commercial value. ValueBlue’s ability to coordinate the complexities of digital architecture and collaboration across departments has never been more important as business leaders look for a solution to manage and refresh outdated infrastructure and technology stacks.”
Capital utilisation
According to the company, the proceeds from this round will enable ValueBlue’s US, UK, and EMEA expansion, grow its workforce, and further develop the existing software platform supporting enterprise architecture (EA) use cases.
Wilko Visser, CEO of ValueBlue, tells Silicon Canals, “The new investment signifies that we’re on the right track and it will also strengthen our dedication to our customers. Businesses already face a multitude of challenges and agile transformation can be a daunting feat, but ValueBlue is here to simplify enterprise architecture and make the transition to digital feel exciting and seamless.”
In terms of expansion, ValueBlue’s focus markets are North America and the UK.
In the US, the company is expanding the New York and field-based team. In December, it appointed Brenda Cowie as SVP Sales and Strategic Partnerships for the Americas, and also hired a number of commercial roles, with hiring currently ongoing. The company has also opened a London location and has onboarded senior sales executives.
“The New York, London, and Hong Kong teams will be working closely with our Utrecht HQ to develop our market presence globally and expand our customer base in these strategic geographies,” adds Visser.
“Accelerate innovation and transformation based on data and insights”
With the Covid-19 pandemic expediting the urgency for businesses to shift to the digital economy, it’s now more important for companies to implement digital transformation strategies in order to survive and flourish.
In 2011, Wilko Visser founded ValueBlue as a consultancy agency. The company’s mission is to help organisations improve their business by giving them insight into their processes, architecture and data so that they can speed up decision-making and time-to-market.
In 2014, ValueBlue developed BlueDolphin, the SaaS collaboration application to map the digital landscape and business processes of organisations. BlueDolphin combines all data on the business processes and IT landscape and translates it into management and improvement information, with clear visualisations and reports.
Talking about ValueBlue’s business model and revenue generation streams, Visser says, “Our core revenue comes from the SaaS platform, which we sell on a user-based licensing model. But alongside that, we do still offer our consulting and customer success expertise to BlueDolphin customers. The recurring product revenues, however, are 80 per cent of our total yearly revenues now. Our total projected revenues for 2022 are $8.6M.”
ValueBlue’s story
Wilko Visser says, “The name ValueBlue was inspired by Renée Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim’s book ‘Blue Ocean Strategy’. Innovation in an existing field needs to be so ground-breaking that it generates a completely new field: a ‘Blue Ocean’. In a Blue Ocean, the rules of the game still need to be created and every day is a leap of faith. In 2014, our own ground-breaking Blue Ocean product was born – We call it BlueDolphin.”
BlueDolhin was started based on an academic concept of the areas of enterprise architecture, business process management, and data management. Over the years, the company made the transition from consultancy to a product company and secured the first 100 customers using the software.
In June 2019, it went on to raise €2M from Newion in a Seed round to expand its development and marketing capacity as well as to open New York offices. Also in 2019, the platform was featured in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Architecture tools.
The company says that it has witnessed ‘remarkable’ growth in the last couple of years – from 50 customers in 2018 to almost 200 today. The company managed to sign partnerships with global customers like Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, Wakefern Food Corp, AS Watson, and Randstad. With such growth, ValueBlue ended 2021 with a realised ARR of $4.7M. In 2022, it is expected to close an ARR of $7M.
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