Raleigh, NC-based document management startup KnowledgeTree announced they’ve added $4.75 million in Series B funding today, from several investors including River Cities Capital Funds, Core Capital Partners, Hatteras Funds and lead Series A investor Hasso Plattner Ventures Africa. The company’s web and mobile tools help clients create and manage their cloud-based documents, and the startup has over 200 clients including Alcatel-Lucent and Fujifilm.
KnowlegeTree CEO Daniel Chalef said this new injection of funding will go towards adding to their sales and marketing teams, as well as hiring more engineers to build on the product. “In the last 24 months we have exceeded our expectations in terms of finding great customers to sell to, and the type of success that our customers would have in implementing the social and structured components of the KnowledgeTree application,” Chalef said in an interview. “The primary focus is to increase the sales and marketing organization so we can assist more customers, and to continue to develop the technology that we have in the market.”
Launched in 2010, the company targets mid-market and enterprise companies to let their internal teams co-author documents, find internal resources, and expedite the approval process. Customers can access the software-as-a-service (SaaS) tool online, via desktop sync, or via the iOS and Android apps. Users can share documents with their colleagues and external partners, set access controls, and create workspaces so teams can collaborate on documents. Collaborators can add comments, feedback and edits, and view each version of the document as it moves through the approval process. KnowledgeTree also has several third-party integrations, including Microsoft Office, so users can edit directly within programs like PowerPoint and Excel and see data associated with each document, including version history and past edits.
There are specific product offerings for legal and finance teams, as well as a solution for general business users, and although the company has over 200 clients, Chalef said they actually service more companies since many clients work with suppliers and external teams. To help organize with internal business units and third parties, companies can organize documents by location, business unit, or other parameters, and configure an internal document search engine.
Chalef said pricing is on a per-user basis, with their largest implementation at a few thousands users, and the average deal in the tens of thousands. When it comes to document management and collaboration tools, the field is competitive, with Google Docs for Business users, and Dropbox cornering the software-as-a-service (SaaS) space. Chalef said that Dropbox might be less expensive, but that’s because it’s focused on small teams and consumers. “Dropbox is focused on consumers and small teams, we typically sell KnowledgeTree at a far higher price point, given the complexity and capability of KnowledgeTree, and the higher order problems that we solve for customers.”
In terms of the focus for the next few months, Chalef said they’ll be adding to their mobile strategy by adding in social and workflow capabilities. They’ll also be rolling out more third-party integrations with CRM vendors and finance applications. Ultimately he said the focus will continue to be on enterprise-level document management. “We find that within these larger organizations we’re able to address quite an acute problem for this, and that is creating content, finding great content within their organization, and how do we also manage that content through its lifecycle,” Chalef said. But with Dropbox Teams increasingly targeting businesses of all sizes, the company will have to maintain its foothold on enterprise clients in order to win the cloud storage wars.