NY Cloud Startups Find Success and VC Funding

Image via CrunchBase

By providing companies with niche software via the Internet cloud, a group of NY startups is expanding, according to Xconomy. Technology companies are leveraging the lower cost of offering Web-based software in order to reel-in new business customers.

GramercyOne recently closed $14.5 million in a recent funding round, as the capital is intended for technology developments and new hires. GramercyOne, as well as other cloud-based software providers such as Profitably and Erply, are expanding their businesses by offering flexibility to their clients.

“Three years ago being a cloud-based solution was a detriment in the sales process,” GramercyOne CEO Josh McCarter told Xconomy. “Now it’s almost a requirement.” According to McCarter, cloud-based software providers gain more new business because of the flexibility to offer upgrades and the lower costs compared with software installed on computers. “It has made the process easier to convert people off their legacy systems.” GramercyOne’s software enables merchants to track and control special promotions, so that customers using deals won’t inundate the business while merchants already see large numbers of patrons, McCarter told Xconomy.

Erply, another provider of point-of-sale software and inventory management via the cloud, is also burgeoning.  The company, whose subsidiary Point of Sale is based in NY, raised $2 million in March 2010 from a multitude of investors. “People do not like to be 100 percent Web-dependent at the register.” Robert Jacob, the US vice president of sales with Point of Sales, told Xconomy. “[For some] it is too big of a risk to have registers go down for 20 minutes.” Erply has released a Windows-based application that lets merchants operate sans an Internet connection and then update sales and inventory when a connection is reestablished, in addition to providing software from the cloud.

Xconomy‘s final reference is one-year-old NY-based Profitably, which has developed Web-based business planning and analysis software that startsups and small businesses can use to guide them through management. The company raised $1.1 million in March in a round let by White Owl Capital, which was used to hire developers and facilitate a move to the General Assembly tech incubator. CEO and co-founder of Profitably, Adam Neary, stated that his company’s software is designed to replace spreadsheets for tasks like forecasting cash flow and creating analytics to show how companies have performed.

The company’s platform is based on posing questions about the users and steadily developing plans based on their unique responses.  “If you have an abrupt change in the way customers convert through the sale pipeline, it’s very easy to model that out,” Neary told Xconomy. Users have the ability to run scenarios such as what happens if the companies increase their pricing and conversion rates decline. “These are things businesses are dying to think through,” he added.

Xconomy