Vertex in the News | 2005

Press-Sense Raises $5M Series A For International Expansion
Author: Hope Glassberg
VentureWire, Jun 6, 2005

Press-Sense Ltd., an Israeli developer of commercial printing software, has raised a $5 million Series A round.

Evergreen Ventures and Vertex Venture Capital led the round. As a result of the financing, Erez Shachar, managing partner at Evergreen Venture Partners, and Emanuel Timor, partner at Vertex Venture Capital, joined the board.

Chief Executive Shlomo Ben-David said that funding would be used for sales and marketing purposes and for establishing sales offices in the U.S., Europe and eventually, Japan. He said that the company has not made any final decisions yet about the specific locations of the new offices.

"We realize the market is becoming much more ready for such a solution from what we [had previously] analyzed," Ben-David said regarding the timing of the round.

Press-Sense`s iWay software line provides PDF workflow, scalable print management, online ordering and price quoting for commercial printers. The company makes a version of its software for small to medium sized businesses and for larger enterprise deployments.

Ben-David said that Press-Sense sells exclusively through channel partners, which include local print dealers and distributors and systems integrators and large vendors like Xerox Corp. and Océ N.V. The company has several hundred customers such as Advantage Printing, Top Publishing and Hunter Lodge.

Ben-David said that the company took in a few million dollars in revenue in 2004, a 150% increase from 2003 revenue, but did not give specific figures. He said that the company is not profitable yet.

Press-Sense was founded in 2001 as a spin-off from ProImage, an Israeli software developer of newspaper production systems. The initial focus of Press-sense was Web-based software solutions for managing digital printing. Since then, the company has expanded its software to enable management of the entire printing operation.

Press-Sense, which is based in Caesaria, Israel, has 32 employees and should have around 48 employees by year`s end.

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