Voxeo Talks

When you see a buyer’s market out there, and you yourself are in a great financial position, doesn’t it make sense to seize the opportunity to grow further?

This morning we were very pleased to announce a $9 million (USD) strategic investement in Voxeo by North Atlantic Capital and the Florida Growth Fund. We’ve already seen some great coverage by the Orlando Sentinel, TechCrunch, VentureBeat and others. We’ll be tracking coverage on this news page:

http://blogs.voxeo.com/news/investment2009/

Given that we have been an employee-owned company since 2004, have been profitable and growing like crazy since that time (1,361% over the last five years!), and have turned down numerous investment requests over the years, the number one question we’ve been getting since word of the investment first started leaking out a few weeks ago has been …

Why now?

The best answer is perhaps the quote from our CEO Jonathan Taylor in today’s Orlando Sentinel article:

Taylor plans to reach those goals through an aggressive acquisition strategy that will bring in new customers and new employees, something the company has been doing since the recession began. He hopes to buy three of four companies next year by following a strategy that he compares with a deep-pocketed real-estate mogul attacking the housing market.

“There are a lot of people that want to or need to sell their company, but there’s not a lot of buyers,” said Taylor. “So if you are a buyer, you’re in a position to really get some great deals. That’s the single biggest reason why we decided to take this investment.”

The effects of the economy are easy to see out there. In our industry, some competitors are either going bankrupt or laying off many employees. Startups with innovative technology are struggling to survive.

Meanwhile, we’re growing, adding many more customers for both our hosted and premise services and have no need for the investment… but it made sense for us to take a minority investment to help us seize the opportunities out there. We are still employee-owned… we just now have a few friends helping us grow even further and faster!

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