Altara Ventures joins FreeAgent’s US$12.6M financing round

Singapore: Singapore-based early-stage VC firm Altara Ventures announced today it joined the US$12.6-million funding round of FreeAgent, an enterprise software company offering a cloud platform that helps businesses manage customer-facing work better.

The round was led by US-based early-stage investor Pelion Venture Partners and joined by existing investor BlueRun Ventures.

With the new funding, US-based FreeAgent plans to deepen its product development and ramp-up go-to-market activities.

Launched in 2016 by Dave Stephens and Ryan Manning, FreeAgent helps teams collaborate across multiple projects, track and improve operational performance in a unified platform.

Dave Ng, General Partner at Altara Ventures, said; “By partnering with FreeAgent, meaningful exchanges between experienced folks from the mature SaaS ecosystem, for example, the US, can be encouraged with newer aspiring SaaS founders from Southeast Asia.”

“Our partnership with FreeAgent also allows us to help them with expansion into Southeast Asia, promoting the growth of SaaS ecosystem here,” he added.

FreeAgent claims to have doubled its subscription revenue through the COVID-19 pandemic and capped off on six quarters of growth.

“When other startups cut resources and trimmed their ambitions, we grew our team and presence in the market. We see ourselves as a serious platform alternative to Salesforce in a market hungry for a real-choice,” Stephens said.

With its primary focus on Southeast Asia, Altara aims to invest in the fintech, consumer, enterprise software, logistics, healthcare, and edutech verticals.

Its recent investments include Tonik Financial, a digital bank providing consumer banking services in the Philippines; Stashfin, a mobile-first digital fintech providing consumer credit in India; and Senseye, a deep-tech, AI, and data science company that provides insights into user cognitive states.