Former Google executives land Balderton Capital as VC backer for QuBit venture

Balderton Capital has led a $7.5 million (£4.65 million) investment into QuBit and placed general partner Bernard Liautaud onto the board.

A business founded by four ex-Google product, marketing and engineering executives has attracted Balderton Capital as an equity backer and will now look to build beyond its UK presence to the US and mainland Europe.

QuBit, which provides website optimisation products, has netted $7.5 million (£4.65 million) in fundraising.

The deal represents the company’s second funding round following on from an investment of $1.35 million made in by Westminster Growth Capital October 2010.

As part of the deal, Bernard Liautaud, general partner at Balderton Capital, has joined QuBit’s board. Liautaud previously founded Business Objects in 1990, the first European software IPO on Nasdaq.  In January 2008, Business Objects was acquired by SAP for $6.8 billion, the third largest software acquisition at the time.

QuBit has reportedly grown its revenues by 300 per cent during 2012 and will use the funding capital to bring to market its new software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform as well as develop its SaaS tag management product OpenTag.

The company works with major eCommerce businesses and publishers including Arcadia Group, John Lewis, BBC and Staples.

Graham Cooke, CEO of QuBit, comments, ‘To get the backing of an organisation like Balderton is a strong validation of our business and our technology.

‘As well as bringing us finance, we also get the involvement of Bernard, the founder of the most successful business intelligence company in history.  That sort of input is going to be invaluable to us and can only help to build this business into a world leader.’

Liautaud says, ‘What’s most impressive with the QuBit approach is that they’ve created more than a point solution; they’ve already developed a comprehensive suite of products that let website owners collect, understand and act upon the huge amounts of data generated by customer interaction with their websites.’

Hunter Ruthven

Bernard Williamson

Hunter was the Editor for GrowthBusiness.co.uk from 2012 to 2014, before moving on to Caspian Media Ltd to be Editor of Real Business.

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