Built on Collaboration

We announced last week that Aconex has secured a AU$107.5 million (US$85m) growth funding deal with US-based private equity firm Francisco Partners. As far as we're aware, it's the largest ever private equity capital raising by an Australian technology company.

As you can imagine, we're all very excited about what this means for the business and are looking forward to using the funds to develop our product and grow the business.

A few things about the deal are particularly significant in the context of the collaboration technology market:

Acceptance of construction collaboration tools
The investment indicates the market's acceptance that web collaboration tools are on the fast track to becoming standard on construction and engineering projects. We've seen global uptake of our system double each year for the past five years and even the most mature markets, such as the US and the UK, are experiencing strong growth.

Excitement around SaaS
Without exception, all the private equity firms we met with had high expectations for the SaaS (Software as a Service) market. A report I read by International Data Corporation estimated that the overall SaaS market will grow at a compound rate of 32.0% annually. As discussed in previous posts, this mode of delivery is by far the most suitable for the collaborative environment of construction and engineering projects.

It's not all doom gloom!
Despite the current turmoil in some financial centers, many of the world's key construction markets - the Middle East, North Africa and SE Asia for example - have so far been unaffected. Firms operating in these boom markets will be considerable less exposed over this tumultuous period, and can still experience strong business growth.

If you want to find out more about the deal, there's a podcast of an interview I did with ZDNet here. Also, our next task is to hire about 50 software engineers, mainly in Melbourne Australia, so if you know of any suitable candidates, please push them to the Aconex website!

Labels: Global trends, Technology