2013年创立的Zenifits刚C轮融资5亿美元,估值45亿美元,Freemium模式

2014年增长最快的创业公司不是Uber或Airbnb，而是Zenifits。这家2013年在旧金山创立的公司刚完成C轮融资5亿美元，估值达45亿美元！2014年其员工由20->500人，营业额由1百万->2千万美元。其业务则是提供免费云端的HR人力资源管理服务给美国中小企，以Freemium模式免费给出核心模块，靠其他付费模块和介绍客户给医疗保险公司等赚钱。中小企用户可以使用它来管理薪酬、福利、补贴等。目前，已经有几千家不同规模的公司采用Zenifits提供的云端HR服务。

《福布斯》评出2014年的15家成长最快创业公司。


唐: 可能因为国内诚信问题，还没有出色的B2B公司上市，连阿里也不靠B2B赚钱。但国内的游戏公司基本上都是Freemium的模式！ >>@程仁田-达晨创投:国内的模仿者都难成功。中美企业级应用环境差异极大>>@xbatu:盈利模式很棒。典型的双赢甚至多赢模式。高 >>@leboer1990:总有能人在世 >>@马上要低碳:非常实际的盈利模式


云端HR服务公司Zenefits获5亿美元融资，估值飙升到45亿美元
2015-05-07 13:36·TMT　 钛媒

　　Zenefits是一家帮助中小型企业管理员工薪酬、医保、社保、休假等问题的公司，2013年成立于旧金山。该公司称至今已经有超过1万家美国公司在其平台上注册，管理着超过7亿美元的健康保险。
　　美国中小企业云端HR服务公司 Zenefits 5月6日宣布获5亿美元的巨额融资，富达投资、Research Company 和TPG领投，此轮融资让该公司的估值飙升到45亿美元。

　　Zenefits是一家帮助中小型企业管理员工薪酬、医保、社保、休假等问题的公司，2013年成立于旧金山。该公司称至今已经有超过1万家美国公司在其平台上注册，管理着超过7亿美元的健康保险。它还表示今年的收入有望达到1亿美元。自从创建以来，该公司的估值在两年内已经上升到45亿美元。去年6月它完成B轮融资时估值为5亿美元。

　　该公司CEO Parker Conrad表示巨额融资是为了保持公司的快速增长。

　　它发展如此迅速的原因是：免费。Zenefits通过分享那些提供五险一金服务商的利润来维持运营。举一个例子，用户通过免费使用云端管理员工人事问题，而同时可以选择购买某家的医疗保险服务。而这家医疗保险公司的所得利润与Zenefits挂钩。

　　免费总是诱人的。因为在过去企业用户总需要支付一大笔钱给那些管理员工的HR软件，比如甲骨文或者SAP。

　　Zenefits已经成为加利福尼亚最顶尖的数字化医疗保险企业服务公司之一。

　　几个月前该公司刚刚聘请了Yammer创始人David Sacks担任其首席运营官，Sacks自己也对Zenefits进行了一大笔投资。2012年，由他创办的Yammer以12 亿美元的高价被微软收购。

　　快速增长也是有代价的，有消息称该公司今年将亏损1亿美元，这让它去年烧钱的数额相形见绌。

　　Zenefits去年底表示它在全美47个州服务2000家公司，并称其用户增长了1600%。

　　此轮融资大部分将用于增加员工，去年该公司称将在未来3年内雇佣大约1300名员工，去年底它的员工数为约500人。

　　参与此轮融资的其他风投公司还有Insight Venture Partners, Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Institutional Venture等。该公司表示至此它已经成为Andreessen Horowitz投资最大的公司。




http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2014/12/17/how-zenefits-beat-out-uber-airbnb-to-become-2014s-hottest-startup/
How Zenefits Beat Out Uber, Airbnb To Become 2014's Hottest Startup
12/17/2014

Zenefits Cofounder and CEO Parker Conrad (Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

There are a lot of big names on this year’s list of hottest startups. But you’ve probably never heard of the #1 overall.

That’s because Zenefits, the fastest growing startup of 2014 by valuation, is barely a year old — and it’s disrupting a stodgy industry most people know nothing about: small business human resources.

Zenefits, which raised its $17 million Series A round in January 2014, came back to the well again in August for a $61 million Series B round that valued the company at more than $650 million (according to private company research firm VC Experts). The company has been successful at least partially because of Obamacare’s complex new health care rules.

Small businesses across America have to buy health insurance for their employees, and they typically use middlemen brokers for the service. But Zenefits gives away cloud-based human resources software for free and lets businesses purchase insurance through their platform. Again, Zenefits charges customers nothing for that service — it instead charges a commission to the health insurance companies who sell the policies.

That model has worked beyond cofounder Parker Conrad’s wildest dreams, gaining Zenefits more than 2,000 customers (with 50,000 employees in 47 states) in the first 18 months since official launch in May 2013. Zenefits boasts extreme revenue growth with that base. August was the company’s best month in terms of net new revenue, and October saw 100% growth from there. Year-end revenue is projected to be up 20 times what it was at the beginning of 2014.

All this makes Zenefits one of the fastest growing software-as-a-service companies ever. Now the Andreessen Horowitz and Institutional Venture Parters-backed startup is using its new wealth to scale up and meet demand (a human resources challenge of its own). Starting with 15 employees at the beginning of 2014, it currently has 470, including 340 in San Francisco and 130 at new offices in Phoenix, Arizona. Zenefits made a deal with Arizona to hire 1,300 full-timers over the next three years. And Conrad just hired former Yammer founder David Sacks as his new COO.

While Zenefits is not yet at the scale of companies like Uber or Airbnb (who also make the 2014 Hottest Startups list), it is already confronting similar problems — namely, regulation. Many states have regulation preventing brokers from providing rebate benefits to customers to protect against unfair competition, and Utah sees Zenefits’ free software giveaway as a violation of that rule. The state is threatening to fine Zenefits up to $100,000 and wants the company to charge “fair market value” for its free human resources dashboard.

We’ll see who comes out on top in the long run, but so far Zenefits has been a runaway success on par with any young Silicon Valley startup.



Zenefits Financials Reveal It Is One Of The Fastest-Growing SaaS Businesses Ever
http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/14/zenefits-financials/
Jan 14, 2015

We all knew that cloud HR startup Zenefits is growing fast, but how fast exactly? At the 33rd Annual JPMorganChase Health Care Conference today, Zenefits CEO Parker Conrad plans to share some of the company’s financials, which will put its growth numbers into perspective.

In a presentation this afternoon, Conrad will reveal that at the close of its fiscal year this month, Zenefits will surpass $20 million in annually recurring revenue after less than two years in business. That’s up from $1 million at the same time last year, which means the company grew 20x over the last 12 months.

Based on its current growth trajectory, Zenefits expects annually recurring revenue to grow to $100 million over the next year. That might not seem like a lot, especially given the amount of money it’s raised since being founded (about $85 million) and its most recent valuation ($500 million).

But let’s put the company’s growth trajectory into context: It took SaaS businesses like Workday and Salesforce about four years to reach $20 million in annual recurring revenue; and it took each of them about five or six years to hit $100 million.

The most interesting thing about those numbers is that, unlike some other enterprise SaaS companies, Zenefits doesn’t charge for use of its cloud-based HR platform. It’s only if customers choose to designate it as their insurance broker that Zenefits makes any money. Even then, it receives a commission from the insurance provider, so customers continue to enjoy use of its platform for free.

All of this points to why private investors have been clamoring to invest in Zenefits, and why it has such aggressive plans to expand. It also might help explain why Yammer founder David Sacks came out of retirement to join Zenefits as COO despite already being a bazillionaire.

Zenefits started off 2014 by raising a pretty modest $15 million funding round from Andreessen Horowitz, but quickly added to its coffers. Six months later, it went back and got another $66.5 million from a16z and Institutional Venture Partners.

Based on its growth projections, the company has also been hiring aggressively. In 2014, the company went from 15 to more than 500 employees. Headcount is set to balloon even further, as Zenefits recently opened a 100,000-square foot office in Scottsdale, Ariz., where it expects to hire 1,300 employees over the next three years.

While Zenefits’ revenue numbers are impressive, especially for a company that is just two years old, it’s worth pointing out that not all revenue is created equal. It isn’t clear how expensive its revenue is to generate, especially considering the massive increase in the company’s headcount recently.

Other fast-growing SaaS businesses, like Box for example, eventually reported revenue that cost far more to generate than some expected. The result of that was a delayed public offering at a lower per-share price than was first assumed.

The market could be given some indication of how quickly the firm is spending cash to grow its recurring revenue by the timing and size of its next financing round.



Zenefits Just Raised $500 Million At A $4.5 Billion Valuation
http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/06 ... -billion-valuation/
May 6, 2015

Zenefits today said it has raised $500 million in a round led by Fidelity and TPG at a whopping $4.5 billion valuation.

The company, which allows small- and medium-sized businesses to manage human resources services in a much simpler fashion, is one of the fastest-growing SaaS businesses ever, and in an interview, Zenefits CEO Parker Conrad said the big round was raised to keep the company growing as quickly as it already is.

“If you think about it like we’re driving a car, we want to go extremely fast at an extremely high speed, and go very far,” Conrad said. “And if you want to do that you’re gonna burn a lot of gasoline. So this round we had to do the mother of all pit stops for gas and beef jerky, to continue building at the speed that we’re going.”

Still, such rapid growth doesn’t come without a cost. Our sources previously told us that the company expects to lose more than $100 million in 2015, which dwarfs the amount of money it burned through in 2014. Raising venture capital financing is an important way to shore up against those losses and still sustain the incredibly rapid growth a company like Zenefits has experienced.

The numbers fit in with what we earlier reported, but the notable thing here is that over the course of Zenefits’ most-recent financing process, the valuation has grown by billions. Earlier, we had heard the valuation could be around $3 billion, and that it could go as high as $4 billion. That number apparently went up once again — a sign that interested investors are bidding it up in order to get into one of the most sought-after startups.

parker conradLike many other modern enterprise services, Zenefits aims to have a much easier onboarding process for payroll and benefits for employees.

The company offers its HR services dashboard to employers for free, and makes money by receiving commissions from insurers. Zenefits also said as part of the announcement it has signed up more than 10,000 companies in the U.S. and that it closed more business in March this year than it had in around the first year of its life. Zenefits said it now manages over $700 million in health insurance premiums, as well.

The company said it’s on track to hit annual recurring revenue of $100 million by January 2016, and hit $20 million in annual recurring revenue in January this year. Since launching in April 2013, the company has gone to a valuation of $4.5 billion in just about two years. In June last year, the company was valued at $500 million as part of its series B financing round.

“The faster you grow, the more capital you burn, because of this dynamic that revenues span over time and the costs are front-loaded,” Conrad said. “If we want to grow that quickly it requires a lot of capital to do the plan that we want to go out and do. Obviously we can grow less quickly and do it on a lot less capital, but we’re in this fortunate position where there are a lot of investors that see our SaaS metrics and say, holy crap this is going to be extremely profitable, all the numbers make a lot of sense.”

A lot of that is going to come in the form of headcount, our sources tell us. Last year, the company said it wanted to hire around 1,300 employees over the next three years, and it had around 500 by the end of 2014.

Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures, Insight Venture Partners, Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures also invested in Zenefits, and previous investors Andreessen Horowitz, IVP and Jared Leto participated, as well.

This latest Zenefits round is notable too for making the company Andreessen Horowitz’s largest investment to date.

“In my experience, the momentum that Zenefits has achieved in two years is unprecedented. Zenefits has brought the benefits of software to a massive industry that had yet to embrace technology at scale,” said Lars Dalgaard, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, in a statement. “And their potential market includes tens of millions of employees, using multitudes of different business applications in companies of all sizes. We’re thrilled to have led the A and B rounds and to have doubled down again in the C round.”