Performio, an Irvine-based company whose software automates the tracking of sales commissions, plans to beef up its own sales staff following a $75 million investment, one of the larger local funding deals for a privately held area tech firm this year.
The investment, led by Baltimore-based JMI Equity, is expected to help Performio increase its staff and boost global expansion, officials say.
“The $75 million is going to allow us to basically hire more people. We’re going to hire more sales and marketing people to grow more aggressively in the U.S., Europe and Asia-Pacific,” Performio Chief Executive Grayson Morris told the Business Journal on June 29.
The company currently has 115 employees, with about 20 to 25 of them based in Orange County. The firm said it more than doubled its staff size in 2021.
Morris, who has been with the company since 2019, said the company plans to have about 150 people on staff by year’s end.
IPO Experience
In addition to sales positions, the company will also hire more product engineering people, as well as add services and support employees “to support all the new customers that we are acquiring.”
Performio, which also has offices in San Francisco and the Australian city of Melbourne, was advertising for 19 positions on its website as of July 6.
Recent hires for the company include Chief Revenue Officer Neil Graham and Chief Technology Officer Dmitri Korablev.
Graham has helped “SaaS revenue organizations to exceptional results for over two decades, including delivering on two successful IPO’s,” and previously counted leadership positions at Salesforce Inc., Tealium and Jive Software, the company said in May at the time of his hiring.
Korablev was most recently VP of engineering at Datometry, a database virtualization platform.
Spreadsheet Converts
Performio provides a “cloud-based sales performance management platform” that sales and finance teams at organizations use to manage, calculate, and communicate incentive compensation information.
In simpler terms, the company’s enterprise-grade software is used to keep track of salespeople’s commissions—once a cumbersome and laborious process.
Before adopting Performio, 80% of its customers used spreadsheets to manage their sales-commission process.
“We automate all of that,” Morris says.
“We bring in all the data, we do the commission calculations, and then we have a portal where the salespeople can log in and see what they’re getting paid each month.”
“This is a $5 billion global market. It’s a big market,” he says.
Morris says Performio has five major competitors, including Xactly of San Jose which was sold in 2017 for $564 million, and Spiff in Sandy, Utah, which got $46 million in funding last year.
“We’re in a very competitive space.”
Irvine Move
Founded by sales-compensation expert David Marshall in Australia in 2006, Performio initially served customers in the Asia-Pacific region.
The company expanded to the U.S. in 2017 and shifted its global headquarters to Irvine two years later. It now serves a customer base around the world.
“We love being in Orange County. We have employees all around the world. We definitely have a critical mass here in Orange County,” Morris said.
The company is located in a WeWork space in a building along Von Karman Avenue, near John Wayne Airport.
Revenue Up 77%
Morris declined to provide revenue figures. However, the company says it increased its year-over-year revenue by 77% in 2021.
Performio says it “currently works with some of the world’s largest banking, media, healthcare, manufacturing, technology, and software companies.”
Notable clients include AstraZeneca, BrowserStack, ChargePoint, Contentful, Drager, Johnson & Johnson, OnDeck, Simpli.fi, Veeva Systems, Vodafone and WP Engine, according to a Performio statement last month.
Investors
JMI Equity Chairman Paul Barber and JMI Vice President Jack Duane joined Performio’s board of directors as part of the funding arrangement.
“Performio is an emerging leader in sales commission software, and we are excited to help take the company to the next level,” said Barber in a June 14 statement about the financing round.
JMI, which invests in software companies, counts a local office in San Diego, and has invested on other local companies in the past, including Peregrine Systems.
Morris said “multiple firms” have invested in the Performio, including Pacific Lake Partners of Boston and Trilogy Search Partners of Bellevue, Wash., in addition to JMI Equity.
