SugarCRM Raises $33 Million in Round Led by NEA

Usually when there’s any discussion around customer relationship management software, it inevitably turns to Salesforce.com, which built its reputation and a $22 billion market capitalization around a cloud-based system for keeping track of sales contacts and customers. It also positioned itself as an alternative to Oracle and SAP, which also do CRM. Other players are Microsoft and NetSuite, which offers CRM as part of its larger enterprise resource-planning suite.

But there’s another alternative, called SugarCRM, that has been gaining traction, and which positions itself as an alternative to Salesforce. It’s open source, runs both in the cloud and on-premise, and it has a million end users at 7,000 companies in 192 countries.

Today, SugarCRM announced that it had raised $33 million in equity and debt financing. New Enterprise Associates led the round, and Brooke Seawell, an NEA partner, joined Sugar’s board. Silicon Valley Bank and Gold Hill Capital joined as new investors, while prior investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Walden International also participated.

The company saw sales increase by 67 percent last year and added 2,700 new customer companies, making SugarCRM, by its count, the third-most popular CRM product in the world.