Zuora, an SaaS startup that offers online services to manage and automate customer subscriptions and payments, has raised $15 million in a second round of funding from Shasta Ventures and Lehman Brothers Venture Partners, Venturebeat reports. The company had previously raised $6.5 million from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Benchmark Capital (who also participated in this round), bringing the total of funding to $21.5 million.
When Zuora launched its online billing solution last May, we wrote the company aims to alleviate the need for online businesses to develop their own billing systems, especially to handle recurring payments like those associated with subscriptions.
Its so-called “Z-Billing Platform” that goes live today handles four main billing-related areas: customer accounts and subscriptions, product catalogs, billing operations, and order management. The whole offering is provided a la Salesforce as an on-demand solution. Online businesses just need to configure their Zuora accounts, import data from their old billing systems, and plug in their sites through a set of APIs. Customers who buy items or subscribe to services on their sites will then get handled by Zuora, which tracks orders, invoices and payments.
Zuora launched a new product last month dubbed Z-Payments, which allows customers to also actually pay bills, integration with online payment service PayPal included. Vindicia is another venture-backed startup with a similar solution.
Zuora is led by veterans from WebEx, Salesforce.com, Accenture, DiCarta, Postini and Oracle.
lets hope they dont try to take that domain mainstream. sounds like a japanese night gown or under garment of some type. and you thought joongel had issues. i like there products its just there channels have issues. it will “really” be interesting if they take this domain mainstream.
SubscriptionLocator.com
very coool system….how ever this is not technology hard to do….a good development could easily do this with paypal and i believe that amazon also can do this……We think that micro payment and affiliate reselling are are the next wave. We have built a very cool e commerce system into our social network that does this….and we are also adding a subscription service
For the first time in a while on TC, a startup has really excited me. I read through Zuora’s sales pitch and my mouth started watering – the current solutions for recurring billing are pretty awful unless you go hardcore and set up a proper merchant account with a bank etc. The easiest one is paypal, which supports recurring billing but try, for example, to upgrade one of your customers to a higher pay rate (because they want to access more features etc on your SaaS site) and you’ll enter a world of pain.
So I hurriedly “signed up” for Zuora and got this mail:
“Thank you for your interest in Zuora. Our co-founders built the billing systems for WebEx & Salesforce. Our vision is to enable subscription businesses of all sizes to spend less time on operations, and more time growing their business. Our products, Z-Billing and Z-Payments, give SaaS companies and subscription businesses the right tools to support their complex needs.
Z-Billing automates your recurring billing, and integrates with CRM applications, like Salesforce, and accounting systems like Oracle, Quickbooks, Netsuite, and Intacct. It supports all change orders and amendments, pro-ration, overage, usage, and metering charges, creates invoices and charges, and posts these charges to your accounting system.
Z-Payments manages your entire recurring payment lifecycle. It handles customer payment information, automates failed electronic scenarios, and helps collect past-due payments. And it integrates with popular payment gateways, like PayPal and Authorize.net.
If you’d like to learn more on your own, you can:
Read the latest news on Zuora here: http://www.zuor...news/index.html
Read more about Zuora products here: http://www.zuor...ucts/index.html
Feel free to contact us at (650) 641-3777 if you have any questions.”
um…
is this service launched or what? Or do I have to wait for some manual approval process before I can actually access the payments system?
All very cryptic. And to think, their sales pitch pages were so clear…
Yeah I tried to find out more information, I even gave a sales rep my phone number and told her to call me. Day and a half later and no response.
word on the street is they don’t even have a real sales team yet…they just hired someone to start hiring.
Maybe you’ll get a call back after their sales team is trained…oh…and hired!
These days it’s pretty easy to “go hardcore” with setting up a merchant account and doing it yourself, with code out there like my SaaS Rails Kit.
It provides all you need to get going with recurring billing, even account upgrades and downgrades, without the “world of pain”. 
http://railskits.com/saas/
Congrats to the Zuora team! (And nice timing) They will be one of the clear next generation on demand success stories.
I believe these guys are using Boomi for their integration, which is another start-up here on TC that’s making some noise.
Zuora provides an on-demand platform that simplifies the way online subscription services are billed, purchased, and provisioned
Here we go!!
the video is not working.
Both companies (Zuora and Boomi) are johnny come lately’s imho.
These gigantic press releases do nothing more than make me wonder why anyone would do business with a company that is burning through cash the way Z is.
Check these guys out today at 4pm at the http://www.rockstarfair.com event. They will be exhibiting. I am not sure if there any invites left, but maybe TechCrunch can post some?
I interviewed with them recently and what a bunch of snobs. Looks like they have traction, but that still doesn’t justify the way they treat the candidates – starting with the worst recruiter that I have ever come across.
Does anyone have a similar experience?
These guys aren’t cheap, but they have a very full SOAP API that, of course, hooks through to Salesforce CRM.