A fast-growing business software maker with a management team stacked with former Kofax executives has attracted its first venture capital investment.
Laguna Hills-based Ephesoft Inc. raised $15 million in a Series A round from sole investor Mercato Partners, which is headquartered outside Salt Lake City.
The company plans to use the funding for product development on its two main offerings, as well as to boost sales and marketing.
“We’re going to hire like crazy in Orange County,” said co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Ike Kavas, who launched Ephesoft in 2010 after two separate stints with Kofax. “We’re going to add fuel to the marketing engine.”
The quiet company has sped along with little to no marketing, lining up investors and customers primarily through referrals.
Its cloud-based content capture and analytics software is used by more than 500 customers in the financial services, federal government, insurance, and mortgage and healthcare sectors. Sales doubled last year to about $15 million, a year after the company was named to the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing private companies in America.
Ephesoft has doubled global employment in the last two years to 110, about 40 in OC, which places it among the 30 largest software makers here, according to Business Journal research.
It operates about 15 offices in the U.S., two in Europe, and has a development team in India.
Ephesoft plans to hire another 25 in the next 12 months, with an emphasis on senior java developers, data scientists and analytics experts.
“We’re going to build a large engineering group here in Orange County,” said Chief Executive Don Field, who spent more than 21 years at Kofax managing various divisions. “With a sizeable amount of money, we’re able to make investments that we’ve wanted to make.”
Kofax was sold this month to Chicago private equity firm Thoma Bravo, its third sale in as many years (see July 17 issue).
Several other Ephesoft executives worked at the Irvine-based software maker through the years, including vice president of marketing, Tim Dubes; David Talarico, executive vice president of sales; senior vice president of business development, Richard Bosworth; Ian Pope, vice president of sales in the United Kingdom; Andrew Rootes, general manager for Asia Pacific and Japan; and Vice President of Engineering Dean Hough, who co-founded predecessor Kofax Image Products in 1985.
“You’re going to see a lot of the brain trust that migrated from Kofax here but with a new mindset of innovation and customer-centric solutions,” Kavas said. “We created a self-mandate that we will invent something every two years.”
