Zuora

Zuora was founded in 2007 by Tien Tzuo along with K.V. Rao and Cheng Zou (both former WebEx engineers); the company's name is a portmanteau of its three founders' surnames. Tzuo had spent nine years at Salesforce, joining as employee number 11 in 1999 and rising to become the company's first chief marketing officer and later chief strategy officer, after earlier stints at Oracle and CrossWorlds. At Salesforce, Tzuo grew convinced that a wave of businesses would shift from one-time product sales to recurring subscription relationships, and that they would need purpose-built software — distinct from traditional ERP and accounting systems — to handle the billing, pricing, and revenue-recognition complexity that subscriptions create. That thesis became Zuora's founding premise and, later, the basis for Tzuo's 2018 book 'Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future and What to Do About It.'

Zuora built out a cloud platform (Zuora Central) with applications for billing, CPQ, revenue recognition (later expanded via the 2017 acquisition of Leeyo Software) and payments/collections, targeting companies moving to recurring, usage-based, or hybrid pricing models across software, media, IoT, and industrial sectors. The company raised roughly $250 million in venture funding across six rounds between 2007 and 2015 (Series A through F), backed by investors including Benchmark Capital, Greylock Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Index Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Vulcan Capital, and Next World Capital, with notable individual backers reported to include Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Workday co-founder Dave Duffield.

Zuora filed to go public in March 2018 and listed on the New York Stock Exchange on April 12, 2018 under the ticker ZUO, pricing its IPO at $14/share and raising roughly $154 million, valuing the company at over $1.4 billion at listing (rising above $2 billion after its first day of trading). As a public company Zuora continued to expand its platform through acquisitions, including Zephr (a subscription/paywall experience platform) for approximately $44 million in cash in August 2022, and continued to publish its twice-yearly Subscription Economy Index tracking recurring-revenue business performance.

Business model

B2B enterprise SaaS; sells a multi-product subscription/monetization platform (billing, revenue recognition, CPQ, collections) via direct enterprise sales and channel/system-integrator partners (e.g., Deloitte, Accenture, PwC).

Subscription and usage-based SaaS licensing fees from enterprise customers, plus professional services; historically reported as GAAP subscription revenue plus a smaller professional-services line in SEC filings.