Evernote, a Mountain View, Calif.-based company that makes one of my favorite cross-platform apps, called (what else) Evernote, has raised $10 million in new funding. The new round was led by Morgenthaler Ventures, a respected Sand Hill Road firm with a deep history. Evernote had previously raised $6.5 million in VC funding. Phil Libin, Evernote’s CEO, tells The New York Times that he is going to be using the money to expand to new geographic markets and add new platforms. At present the app works on Android, iPhone, BlackBerry, Mac, PC and Palm’s WebOS. As you all know, I am a big fan of the application and its freemium business model. It probably is the single most useful app on my computer and my phones. (Related articles from WebWorkerDaily: Evernote Wants to Be Your Long-term Memory and How to Use Evernote for Collaboration.)
@om – So, it’s total $25.5m in investment now? http://www.crunchbase.com/company/evernote
Can you help add any understanding to the investment thesis of this?
Clearly, there’s got to be more to the story than the math we debated last time around:
http://gigaom.com/2009/09/03/be-selective-and-make-a-point-any-point/#comment-971480
How are they going to get this company to a value of $300m+ ??
To be clear, I cant answer your question without talking to either the VCs or the company: I don’t quite have the required information.
I am actually surprised by the fact that they had to do another round of funding, considering that they were talking about improving financial and what not.
How do they get to the valuation of $300 million? Well not sure: Admob got sold for $750 million with $50 million in revenues. (Not sure if that is accurate either.) That works out to about 15 times revenues. In order for Evernote to get $300M they would need to get to $20 million in annual sales. (Again, my caveat is that it is apples-and-oranges comparison because both companies are in different industries.)
Yup…. not an easy mountain to climb. Anyway I will post after I speak with the company.
at roughly $40 a year per paid user, they could easily reach $20m a year
JT
Can you share your math with me and Hahnfeld?
I am assuming you are using 500,000 subscribers @$40 a year. In order to do that, they would need about 12.5 million total subscribers and of which 4 percent are freemium converts to premium service. is that your assumption?
“add new platforms” is music to my ears, as I am a Nokia smartphone user. Despite statistics that seem to suggest there are a few Symbian phone users, left on the planet, Evernote doesn’t have an app for the Symbian OS.
. . . that is, they don’t have an app, if you choose not to count their mobile web site and their no-longer-supported IMAP connection.