Share This Story  |   Comments (0)

Inventor and entrepreneur Shinya Akamine, best known as the co-founder and former CEO of Postini Inc., tells Tech Confidential that his current endeavor, BlueRoads Inc., on Monday will announce a $9 million Series C round from previous investors ArrowPath Venture Capital, Cardinal Venture Capital and El Dorado Ventures. That brings the total funding raised by the "partner relationship management" software provider, launched in 2001, to $25 million.

Postini was acquired by Google Inc. in July for a very tidy $625 million, but it wasn't always a hot property. The e-mail security specialist was launched in 1999, "when all anyone was interested in was Pets.com and nobody cared about e-mail security," Akamine recalls.

At Postini, Akamine was a pioneer of applying the "software as a service," or Saas, model of computing to communications security, and he's taking that same approach to BlueRoads. He holds patents on using Saas for filtering e-mail to block viruses and other malevolent content. Akamine left Postini at the end of 2004, a move he describes as a "typical CEO transition at a startup trying to get to the next stage of growth," and became chief executive of BlueRoads, where he'd served on the board, in April 2006.

BlueRoads uses SaaS to help big companies such as Avaya Inc., Dell Inc. and Polycom Inc. manage their resellers and other third-party vendors. Although the startup faces formidable competition, including Oracle Corp. and Salesforce.com Inc., Akamine says these companies are only modifying tools for internal sales staff, rather than creating new applications for outside salespeople. Specifically, BlueRoads provides partner registration, lead distribution, lead tracking, deal registration, partner opportunity management and lead management services.

In seeking funding, Akamine chose to work with BlueRoads' existing VCs rather than return to the firms that had funded Postini and other startups he's been involved with, pointing out that the company is a different type of business. He says, "It's nice that BlueRoads won this on its own merits."

See TheDeal.com  Friday night for all the details. - Mary Kathleen Flynn

See July 10 story from TheDeal.com

Also From Tech Confidential

• Cisco, VCs re-up in Web security firm Finjan
• Another WebMD deal falls apart
• Bezos-backed TeachStreet on a roll, sets up shop in Bay Area
• Quantance uses old tech to develop new wireless chip
• Lighthouse supplies $18M debt round to Angie's List

Tech Confidential Home Page

---

Post a comment

Name:

Email Address:

URL:

Remember personal info?

Comments: (you may use HTML tags for style)

Please only click "Post" once. It may take a few moments to process.