New round of capital
A new round of high level capital raising was completed in this past week. After many discussions with potential new investors, it was the existing larger shareholders and the board that provided the extra capital sort after in order to fund expansion efforts in both the US and Australia.
The news of the capital raising was significant enough to make Tech Crunch in the US and with names like Peter Thiel (Facebooks first investor) it is not hard to see why it caught the attention of the spectators.
With new offices planned in Sydney to bolster their Australian operations and a more serious footprint in San Francisco being established and led by Jamie Sutherland, I'm looking forward to seeing the benefits of the money spent wisely and all services around Xero boosted.
Acquisitions
Xero's first was Paycycle last year just before Xerocon 2011 (Aust), purchase was made to offer a more competitive single solution to all small businesses in Australia.
The second made the day before Xerocon 2012 (NZ), was the acquisition of Workflow Max, a SaaS application whose focus lies in putting structure and scalability around your work flow process for any professional services business with several tight integrations to Xero already.
Interactive Accounting has been a partner of Workflow Max since January 2010 and it's great to see that Xero is bringing the concept of the Modern Practice to life. Given our close relationship, we're extremely happy for Gavin George and Chris Spence, the two founders who've had a career together spanning 15 years. Very well deserved gentlemen.
Workflow Max will bring a nice boost for service clients, but, it's main benefit will be seen with Accountants and how they run their firms, which will benefit clients as your work flow should be taken care of.
SPP
Xero is having a Shareholders Purchase Plan that will be made available to any entity holding shares in Xero (XRO) on the NZ stock exchange by the 14th of February.
In the past month the share price has experienced a rise of 30% + , speak to your financial advisor before making any decisions, but, it may be a good diversification for your portfolio.
Xero is now becoming the "platform" rather than a simple accounting tool as it's add-on partner network expands and it's core feature set is continuously developed at a rather rapid pace. Always try to think about connecting your systems so that you can gain efficiencies for your business and investment management and not simply that manual input is the only option or that double entry of data is acceptable.
Onwards and Upwards...
If you would like more info about what went on at Xerocon 2012 then you can read my personal blog post for a more detailed summary of the event.
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