ChargeBee recharges with $5M Series A from Tiger Global and Accel Partners

SaaS-based recurring billing startup ChargeBee has secured $5 million in Series B round led by Tiger Global with participation from existing investor Accel Partners. With this, the Chennai-based company snapped up $ 6.17 million of total funding across three rounds.

With this investment, ChargeBee is planning to expand its engineering and customer support team to accelerate their product roadmap. "We will be investing in product engineering to expand our offering and in customer support globally,” said Krish Subramanian, Co-founder & CEO of ChargeBee.

Subscription based SaaS and e-commerce markets have been witnessing exponential growth.

Currently, ChargeBee processes over $100 million annually for their customers that include fast growing startups like Freshdesk, Kissflow, Soylent and VinylMePlease.

“Billing is an amazing opportunity for conversation with customers but also a point of friction if not done well. In a subscription-based business model it becomes crucial to deliver amazing customer experience in billing as much as your product and we focus on delivering this on top of global payment gateways like Stripe & Braintree,” added Krish.

The brainchild of Krish, KP Saravanan, Thiyagarajan T and Rajaraman S, ChargeBee had earlier raised $350k from private angel investors in the US. Later in early 2014, the company secured $800,000 Series A round from Accel Partners.

Over the past few years startups like Stripe, Braintree & others have made it easier for businesses to process payments online. But ChargeBee believes there is a huge gap in the market for fast growing startups that need automation of recurring billing operations apart from payment processing.

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ChargeBee primarily weeds out all the day to day billing use cases that cuts across business functions like finance, support, sales and marketing in a typical subscription business.

“ChargeBee has built amazing relationships with their customers that stand above everything

else in the market. We believe their focus on engineering to build a great platform complemented by this level of customer service is a tremendous opportunity to serve the next generation of globally relevant SaaS businesses,” said Shekhar Kirani of Accel Partners.Following the fresh round, ChargeBee intends to accelerate the product roadmap to expand its product offering and build a local presence in key markets like the US, the UK & Australia. Over 98% of ChargeBee clientele base are global (outside India), as most of them are global SaaS and e-commerce subscription businesses.

One of the TechSparks of 2012, ChargeBee has a workforce of 37 people. Besides Chennai the company plans presence in US and western countries. “We are hiring across various functions in India and sometime soon we would like to setup presence closer to our customer base,” concluded Krish.

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