Irvine-based Accutrac Software Inc., a maker of software that manages companies’ records and other files, said it was bought by the top dog in its niche, Boston’s Iron Mountain Inc.
Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
“Iron Mountain really represents the ultimate company to be acquired by,” said Chief Executive Kurt Thies. “It’s a major validation of our success.”
Accutrac got its start nearly two decades ago in Los Angeles.
Thies was working at a law firm then when he realized there was a big need to track documents.
He developed software that can track paper files through a barcode system. It also tracks digital files.
The company’s 20 local workers moved to University Research Park next to the University of California, Irvine, in 2001.
Helping companies stay in compliance with corporate regulatory laws, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, and transitioning from paper to digital records has boosted Accutrac.
Yearly sales are less than $20 million, Thies said. He declined to give specifics.
Accutrac’s 300 customers include big local companies such as Newport Beach-based Pacific Life Corp., Irvine’s Broadcom Corp., Fluor Corp.’s Aliso Fluor Enterprises Inc. unit in Alisa Viejo and the Newport Beach office of O’Melveny & Myers LLP.
Accutrac’s customers are set to join Iron Mountain’s long list of about 100,000 accounts.
Iron Mountain counted about $2 billion in sales last year.
Richard Reese, Iron Mountain chief executive, hand-picked Accutrac after watching the company for years, Thies said.
“He personally tracked our progress as a company and he and I have had an ongoing dialogue,” he said. “The phone call came from him about four months ago.”
The company’s Irvine office and brand name are set to stay after the deal closes, Thies said.
Accutrac plans to add about 10 jobs locally, he said. All of its current workers agreed to stay on as Iron Mountain employees.
CircleUp Funding
Newport Beach Internet startup CircleUp Inc. last week said it scored $3 million in first-round funding.
The investment was led by Sid R. Bass Associates, a Fort Worth, Texas-based venture capital firm focused on early and late-stage technology companies. The funding also added three partners from Sid. R. Bass Associates to CircleUp’s board.
CircleUp makes a kind of “meta application” for e-mail. The software acts like a social service for groups by making e-mail and instant messaging more efficient.
“E-mail hasn’t changed much in the last fifteen years,” said chief executive and founder John Payne. “Utility and productivity in an e-mail is a very big problem.”
At www.circleup.com, group leaders and administrators can ask questions to a group of any size and get back a single, organized response,instead of a blizzard of responses that need to be sorted through individually. The tool can also be embedded inside a Web site.
CircleUp’s software includes a wizard that walks the user through asking a question and sending it out to different groups. Addresses and screen names can be imported to CircleUp from free e-mail programs, such as Google Inc.’s Gmail, or from Microsoft Corp.’s Outlook.
Users can add graphics, photos, links and maps to the query. In most cases, the technology organizes all of the responses into a spreadsheet format.
It’s particularly useful for sports teams, volunteer organizers, grass roots campaigners and even brides, Payne said.
CircleUp got off the ground with about $750,000 in seed money, mostly from its founders and other industry veterans, including Jim Davis, the former vice president of marketing for eBay Inc.
The service is free. CircleUp plans to make money from keyword-based advertising on its site and ads sent with users’ “questions” to groups. It’s also looking to create a fee-based premium version geared toward businesses, Payne said.
The $3 million will be used to do research on groups that are likely to use the site, Payne said.
“You go around and find market segments that have the problem that we solve and you sort of do a ‘hit-em-high and hit-em-low approach’,by going after professionals, recreational groups and college interns,” he said.
It’s set to be launched commercially later this year, Payne said. CircleUp is looking to raise another round of funding next year.
Payne, 51, is a Long Beach native and attended UC Irvine. He now lives in Laguna Beach.
His biggest success so far is with Stamps.com, an early Internet company that sells printable postage.
He helped raise about $450 million for that company.
