SEATTLE, WA — (Marketwired) — 10/17/13 — , an enterprise startup focused on revolutionizing business operations, today announced it has raised $7.6 million in an oversubscribed Series A round of financing led by , with participation from (CRV) and . Cofounded in May 2013 by enterprise technology veterans Michel Feaster (CEO) and Przemek Pardyak (CTO), usermind will use the funding to advance product development and expand the company-s Seattle-based headquarters. By the end of 2014, usermind plans to add over 20 team members across development, product, marketing, and sales.
“We invested in usermind to get access to Michel Feaster-s mind,” said Ben Horowitz, cofounder and partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “Michel is an unparalleled product thinker in the world of enterprise applications. She and Przemek are exactly the right team to revolutionize business operations in the enterprise.”
Mobile, social, and SaaS are profoundly changing the way customers buy, and how businesses support and service them. Increasingly, the key to business success is business operations that work seamlessly across sales, marketing, support, and services. While the bar for customer experience is shifting, the tools to deliver it are lagging — remaining highly siloed by team with fragmented data. As a result, businesses miss valuable insights and lack key levers to improve their business model. In addition, once improvements are identified, the difficulty involved in evolving the automated business processes limits innovation and dramatically decreases agility and experimentation. usermind believes that the time to revolutionize business operations is now.
Before becoming CEO and co-founder of usermind, Michel Feaster was VP of Products at Apptio, where she defined the category and discipline of Technology Business Management and helped grow the company from 30 to almost 400 employees. Feaster played an integral role in the acquisition of Opsware by HP for $1.6 billion, managed the combined Opsware, Radia and AppIq product teams and defined the Service Automation category. She also spent over seven years at Mercury Interactive, building market-making products like LoadRunner and QualityCenter.
“At usermind, we-re passionate about building enterprise software that breaks all the rules to find new solutions to everyday problems that are costing companies a lot of money, frustration and missed opportunities,” said Feaster. “We-re equally as passionate about the hidden talent that lives in Seattle, which is fast becoming the -Silicon Sound- of the tech world. We are disruptive thinkers, doers and believers. We know what it takes to build amazing software, and based on early feedback we know the market can-t wait to get its hands on our solution.”
CTO and co-founder Przemek Pardyak-s entrepreneurial spirit brings a deep passion for building disruptive high-tech companies. Before usermind, he was the co-founder and CTO of Doyenz, a cloud-based disaster recovery service for SMBs, which was acquired by Persistent Systems. Previously, Pardyak dropped out of his University of Washington CSE PhD program to cofound the application performance management company, Performant — which was acquired by Mercury Interactive for $22.5 million in 2003.
For more information on usermind, including employment opportunities visit . Additionally, usermind will be hosting an open house at its Seattle headquarters on Nov. 7. To register for the event, visit .
usermind is a privately held company based in Seattle. Founded in 2013 by enterprise technology veterans Michel Feaster and Przemek Pardyak, usermind is revolutionizing business operations through rapid experimentation and evolution of key business processes. usermind is backed by venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures and SV Angel. For more information, please visit .
Lindsey Bradshaw
Barokas PR for usermind
206-344-3138
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