Workday which offers ERP systems in the cloud has raised $75M in venture funding. Workday was founded by Dave Duffield, former founder of PeopleSoft.
Last summer, legendary entrepreneur Dave Duffield predicted that his newest startup, Workday, could become the second coming of PeopleSoft — a company Duffield founded and grudgingly sold to Oracle in January 2005 for $10.3 billion.
Whether or not that proves true, Workday — an enterprise resource planning company that delivers its software online — has been gaining traction fast. It now has 340 employees and roughly 80 customers, including numerous Fortune 500 companies like Chiquita Brands and Flextronics (workforces of 23,000 employees and 150,000 employees, respectively).
More, investors have wholeheartedly bought into Duffield’s vision. In addition to several past, mostly undisclosed, rounds of funding totaling $75 million — money from Greylock Ventures and Duffield himself — the company has just raised an additional $75 million in a Series E round led by New Enterprise Associates, which chipped in just north of $45 million. Duffield and Greylock contributed the rest.
I think ERP business is primed to be disrupted by cloud computing. Companies spend too much money implementing and maitaining very expensive ERP systems. Cloud computing can tremendously simlipfy this process make ERP systems affordable to SMEs. Dave Duffield’s experience with Peoplesoft should help.