In April, Outlook Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners invested in the next generation of enterprise applications with a $7.5 million funding of Epiance. Epiance is a leading provider of business process improvement software. Customers use the Epiance process improvement platform, Epiplex, to capture and store existing processes and process data. Epiplex enables business analysts to leverage the captured data to document, analyze and improve business processes then monitor compliance. This data-driven approach increases the quality of the results and deliverables of process improvement projects while decreasing both costs and time to calue. Epiplex is business practice-agnostic, able to model virtually any portion of a company's operations. Epiplex provides customers with high value because it addresses both business process and human performance improvement across the complex processes within Fortune 500 firms. Large organizations have come to realize that a major portion of the huge investment made to date in Information Technology (IT) is 'idle' due to software complexity, workforce turnover and constant process changes driven by competitive environments. Forward thinking organizations now understand that they need a solution like Epiance that explicitly factors the Human Resource element in unlocking the potential of IT investments to support business processes.
Epiance introduced its product in 2002 and has 35 customers. Epiance's customers span financial services, health care, government, manufacturing and technology and include ADP, Aetna, Canon, General Motors, IBM, Merrill Lynch, Microsoft and Toyota. "We automate an extensive part of current business practices," Shankar Ramamurthy, Epiance's CEO noted. The company seeks to replace process management work currently done manually by management consultants -- currently a $92 billion market according to Gartner.
The company currently has about 100 employees--nearly all of which are based in India. Epiance has been profitable and growing but the company decided to accept its first round of venture funding in order to support further growth and bring added expertise to the Board. To complete the management team Epiance will be adding a Vice President of Sales.
