In my opinion, Electronic Invoice Presentment and Payment (EIPP) is not an easily understood subject by Venture Capitalists (VCs) even though Burns e-Commerce, OB10 and Accountis had significant funding from the VC community.
In the case of OB10, this is believed to be in the range of US$30m. But according to Jamie Gunn, CEO of OB10 “we never had the level of investment widely reported”. May be this is due to not meeting the financial targets set by the investors. To my knowledge, OB10 is not yet profitable but has achieved significant year-on-year sales growth over the last 3 years.
Burns e-Commerce is also understood to had funding of about UK£18m. Most of this is believed to have spent on technology platform development.
Funding into Accountis up to end of 2006 was believed to be just around UK£1m, therefore Accountis perhaps is the best among the three companies above in terms of cash utilisation. Accountis was funded by Finance Wales to the tune of £0.5m in its early days. Mike Bakewell, the Investment Executive who dealt with Accountis at the time now works for Merseyside Special Investment Fund (MSIF), which is based in the North West of England. This makes Mike perhaps the only VC in the North West right now who has invested in to the EIPP space.
Jamie, Rhys and Neil, happy to correct if above figures are incorrect.
Ed, thanks for the tip.