Press Releases

bom.com Secures $5 Million in Series B Funding

Round Led by Otter Capital, Joined by Innovation and Design Firm IDEO

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., January 23, 2002 — bom.com today announced it has secured $5 million in Series B funding, led by private equity investment firm Otter Capital. IDEO, a world-renowned innovation and design firm and a bom.com customer, joined this round as a strategic investor. bom.com is the first company to offer a web-native solution for collaborative product development built around a bill-of-materials (BOM) framework. The bom.com product is a powerful tool for storing and organizing product specifications, managing suppliers and pricing information, integrating the supply chain into the design process and unifying members of the entire extended organization in a collaborative working environment.

"Our ability to raise capital in the current environment illustrates the confidence investors have in bom.com," said Michael Topolovac, chief executive officer and co-founder of bom.com. "It confirms not only the strength of our application but also the overall need for more effective — and cost-effective — solutions to enable collaborative product development. We will use the funding to expand our sales outreach, strengthen our market presence and maintain an aggressive approach to developing new functionality."

"During difficult economic times, investors need to see proof," said John Pasquesi, managing member of Otter Capital. "With bom.com, the results were irrefutable. Not only has the company architected an elegant, easy-to-use solution for the complex problem of managing and sharing product information — a problem faced by every hardware design and manufacturing business — but it launched that solution on time and on budget. And around that technology, the company has built a solid customer base, a scalable business model and an experienced management team."

Pasquesi has joined the bom.com board of directors as chairman. Before founding Otter Capital, he was managing director of Hellman & Friedman, a private equity firm whose investments include Formula One Holdings, Young & Rubicam and NASDAQ, among others.

"In a world of shrinking product development cycles, globally dispersed design teams and outsourced manufacturing, seamless collaboration is a business imperative," said David Strong, chief financial officer of IDEO and general partner in IDEO Ventures. "That is the world IDEO inhabits, and that is why we decided to deploy bom.com across our organization. Any business developing complex products needs a better way to navigate this increasingly demanding world. The opportunity for bom.com is tremendous, and that is why we decided to invest."

IDEO was actively involved in the early development of the bom.com application and recently signed a major deal to license the bom.com software.

Since launching in June 2001, the bom.com application has achieved swift market acceptance and sales. Its web-native architecture enables customers to deploy the software in a matter of days — and begin seeing the return on their investment instantly. bom.com customers incur none of the hardware or set-up costs traditionally required to install enterprise-class software and instead pay just a low, per-user subscription fee. The architecture also means that companies using bom.com receive automatic software upgrades on a regular basis. Existing customers have already benefited from the seamless introduction of several major new feature sets, as well as ongoing functionality and usability enhancements.

About Arena Solutions
Arena Solutions is the leading provider of on–demand (SaaS) product lifecycle management solutions for manufacturing companies of all sizes. As the only true on–demand, secure Internet–based PLM service, Arena PLM provides a superior alternative to complicated, lengthy and expensive traditional PLM software deployments. Through its award–winning service, Arena enables product manufacturers and their global supply chains to streamline outsourcing, improve operational efficiencies, and speed time–to–market. Arena PLM has been adopted by more than 15,000 users across companies at all stages of development, including industry leaders Foundry Networks, Color Kinetics, Intuit, Sierra Wireless, Align Technology and more.

Arena Solutions’ market–changing approach to PLM has received significant recognition in the industry, including Manufacturing Business Technology’s Top 40 Emerging Vendors, the Supply & Demand Chain Executive 100, Industry Week’s “Technology of the Year – Notable Innovators” and Start Magazine’s “Hottest” Companies.

Founded in February 2000, Arena Solutions is headquartered in Foster City, California. For more information, please visit the company’s website at www.arenasolutions.com.

Contact:
Cindi Goodsell
cgoodsell@arenasolutions.com
1.510.479.9015

Arena PLM is a trademark of Arena Solutions, Inc. Other product and company names are the property of their respective holders.