Spiceworks is an Austin, Texas-based professional network for IT that connects IT professionals with one another and with more than 3,000 technology brands. Its platform is used by IT professionals in over 200 countries to manage 170 million hardware devices and more than 10 billion traditional and cloud-based application installations. The company intends to use new capital to introduce a new technology platform, add new APIs, and develop new applications and content. Spiceworks has raised $111m in total funding. The business is led by co-founder and CEO Scott Abel. The platform’s scale and usage metrics reflect its role as a widely adopted community and tooling resource for IT teams worldwide. Spiceworks combines free network management, network monitoring and help desk software with a Facebook-like community for IT professionals. It operates the world’s largest social business network for IT, with more than 1.4 million IT pros and over 25% of the world’s SMB IT professionals. Users rely on Spiceworks to discover, buy, and manage $244 billion worth of technology products and services annually; the average business in the network spends over $275,000 per year on technology. More than 200 technology providers, including Microsoft, Google, Dell and Intel, use Spiceworks’ Vendor Pages and social marketing programs to reach buyers. Spiceworks already supports purchase lists, warranty renewals and cloud-service purchases and plans to add group purchasing, deals, integrated RFQs and in-workflow purchasing over the next year. The company recently closed a $25 million Series D to support expansion of integrated commerce within its network. Spiceworks develops a desktop software suite and web-connected tools that help IT staff collaborate, inventory, monitor, troubleshoot, report on, and run help desks for networks. The product includes a social network and crowdsourced troubleshooting platform where members can view and vote on the product roadmap. Feature highlights include a visual network map showing devices and bandwidth consumption, plug-ins, and social media widgets for alerts, tickets, inventory summaries, and news. The software is free to users and monetized through advertising and in-app purchases of IT products and services. Spiceworks reports 850,000 IT professionals using the platform across 196 countries, and more than 25% of businesses with over 100 employees rely on it for part of their IT operations. The company has added themes, skins, customizable portals, and integrations with RSS and social networking widgets to expand user engagement. SpiceWorks builds a free, ad-supported IT Desktop suite that includes Network Inventory, Help Desk, Reporting, Monitoring and Troubleshooting applications. The software is distributed at no cost to users and monetized via Google AdSense served in a sidebar. The company targets IT professionals and SMB IT teams, citing heavy page views from its user base. SpiceWorks reports supporting over 120,000 users and plans to use new capital to support that user base as well as invest in software development and sales and marketing. The ad-supported model is positioned as a differentiator in the competitive SMB IT tools market. Board expansion accompanying the round includes Shasta Ventures' Ravi Mohan and former Dell executive John Hamlin.

Total raised

$106M

Funding rounds

4

Latest round

Series E

Latest activity

Feb 2014