RJMetrics, the Center City-based business-data-analytics software firm cofounded by Robert J. Moore in his Collingswood attic in 2010, has been sold to Magento Analytics, Campbell, Calif., with nearly half the staff joining a separate new company, Stitch. Here's the split:
1) About 40 of RJ's 70 employees will go with Magento. "It's a huge opportunity to make the RJMetrics vision a reality, and I'm excited to see it through," Moore told me. Magento says it's ready to roll out RJ's new merchant analytics platform under its own brand name, to Magento clients such as Signature Hardware, Draper James and Bucketfeet, and thousands of retail end user, boss Mark Lavelle says here.
2) The other 30 staffers are expected to stay with RJMetrics cofounder Jake Stein's new firm, Stitch, which is rolling out a separate "fully managed" new RJ-built service to handle the "soul-sucking" basic "plumbing" of building routine Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) software functions, so clients' high-paid software developers and engineers can focus on the higher-value-added design work.
Ownership: Magento was bought from eBay last fall by UK-based Premira, whose past U.S. investments include Informatica, eBay Marketing Solutions Genesys and Ancestry.com, among others.
"All of RJ's previous investors remain involved with Stitch," Moore confirmed. Those include Silicon Valley-based August Capital, backed by Trinity Ventures and SoftTech. An earlier $1.2 million round included Wharton Professor Kartik Hosanagar, Paoli-based DuckDuckGo.com boss Gabriel Weinberg and Fab.com's Jason Goldberg, among others.
RJMetrics, which fled a New Jersey taxpayer-subsidized Camden "innovation" center for Philadelphia as soon as it could afford to, once hoped rising sales would propel the company forward before seeking a buyer or even a public share sale (IPO).
The firm projected building the staff of engineers, techs and business people above 150, after August, Trinity and SoftTech invested invested $16.5M in late 2014.
But staff peaked below 100, before last winter's layoffs, as business analytics and the fast sales made to big companies eager to sort their data attracted ingenious competitors.
Once sales and earnings growth slows, tech firm bosses turn to making a good exit, as RJ's founders know well: Before they started RJMetrics, Stein (a Wharton graduate) and Moore (a Princeton University and Glassboro High grad) were kid analysts at Manhattan's seminal software investment firm Insight Venture Partners.
Even with Radnor-based Qlik and other local software hopefuls sold, all hope of aggrandizement is not lost among emerging Philly-area firms.
Curalate, Apu Gupta's New Enterprise-FirstRound-Mentor Capital-backed social-media-data company, is the local software-growth firm of the moment, succeeding Monetate, RJMetrics and other earlier flavors.
Among the next wave, for example, "Archer, and Relay, from our portfolio seem to be on the rise, and we heard about Cright recently and trying to better understand what they are doing," notes Mike DiPiano, boss partner at NewSpring Ventures in Radnor.
Buyer Magento was previously owned by the former eBay Enterprise, King of Prussia-based successor to Michael Rubin's old GSI Commerce, which was split into four private-equity-owned successor firms (including KofP- and Georgia-based Radial and Wilkes-Barre-based Pepperjam) last fall.