Workday picks up $85 million in latest round of funding
Workday has garnered $85 million after closing a round of Series F financing. Those funds stemmed from some heavyweight investors, including Morgan Stanley Investment Management and Amazon's Jeff Bezos' own Bezos Expeditions investment company.
A big question now for Workday is whether or not this will be the last round of funding before the enterprise software-as-a-solutions (SaaS) provider decides to declare an initial public offering.
Since it launched in 2005, Workday provides a cloud-based option for mid- and large-sized businesses looking for alternative solutions to manage finances, global human resources, and payroll, among other departments. Currently, Workday has more than 230 companies with over two million users listed on its customer roll sheet.
Workday co-founder and CEO Aneel Bhusri recently told ZDNetduring Dreamforce 2011 that Workday will likely go public within a year with the expectation that it will be the second largest SaaS company behind Salesforce.com the year following the IPO.
Bhusri also asserted that Workday will have more than enough capital when it goes public, estimating that Workday will be about the size of NetSuite (between $250 million to $300 million in revenue) at that time.
AllThingsD reports that Workday could be valued at $2 billion, based on accounts from "sources familiar with the terms of the deal."
For now, Bhusri kept things simpler in a statement, by diplomatically remarking that Workday will continue to focus upon and expand core technology products and administrative infrastructure:
We believe the caliber of this group of investors underscores the market opportunity before us. The world’s largest and most global enterprises are moving their business management solutions to the cloud.
Related: