o9 Solutions, Inc, an enterprise software platform, said it has raised $295 million (around Rs 2200 crore) from General Atlantic and the private equity firm's climate investing venture BeyondNetZero
London headquartered pure-play sustainability investment manager Generation Investment Management and existing investor KKR also invested in this funding round, said o9 Solutions in a statement.
The latest investment was made at a valuation of $2.7 billion, it added. This marks an increase from the $1 billion valuation in April 2020 at the time of the company’s first-ever external investment led by KKR.
The fresh capita will help o9 Solutions accelerate growth for its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered integrated business planning platform -- Digital Brain. It will also enable the company to drive its research and development (R&D) capabilities and industry knowledge models.
US-based o9 Solutions was founded by Indians, Sanjiv Sidhu and Chakri Gottemukkala. o9 Solutions' Digital Brain platform helps companies to achieve improvements in quality of data, the ability to detect demand and supply risks and opportunities earlier, and forecast demand more accurately, among others.
The statement said that this capital raise follows a record year during which the company reported a greater than three-fold year-on-year jump in annual recurring revenue (ARR) from new customers.
“The business fits squarely within our theses at General Atlantic and BeyondNetZero to support companies that are leveraging innovation to tackle some of the most pressing issues in the world. o9 helps large organizations transform their costly, complex and resource-intensive supply chains into profitable and environmentally sound models - playing a critical role in enabling them to work toward net-zero targets,” said Tanzeen Syed, Managing Director, General Atlantic.
General Atlantic has invested $4.5 billion till date in India. It has several unicorns in its portfolio, including edtech firms Byju’s and Unacademy, Acko General Insurance, broking platform NoBroker and the National Stock Exchange. In 2020, it also picked up stakes in Jio Platforms Ltd and Reliance Retail Ventures.
In an interaction with VCCircle recently, Sandeep Naik, Managing Director, General Atlantic, said that the private equity firm is "quite excited about SaaS (software-as-a-service) companies and anticipate it will be a major theme for us in 2022".
