News & Buzz
Recent and featured coverage about Chargify.
Mark Cuban backs Boston startup Chargify
Rodney H. BrownJuly 26, 2011
Chargify LLC, a two-year-old Needham, Mass. startup developing billing software for small and midsize businesses (SMB), announced Tuesday it has received an undisclosed angel investment from Mark Cuban, owner of basketball’s NBA champions, the Dallas Mavericks .
The amount of the funding from Cuban – who made his fortune as the founder of Broadcast.com and HDNet – was not disclosed. In his Chargify blog post, CEO Lance Walley said that the company is now serving 550 businesses using Chargify as their online billing software for software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies.
In a concurrent announcement, the Needham company that spun out Chargify in 2009 said it is getting out of the startup incubator business. Grasshopper Group LLC provides a virtual phone service aimed at startups and SMBs. The company’s service malfunctioned and went off-line for days, last month.
In the Grasshopper blog, founders CEO Siamak Taghaddos and CTO David Hauser said that going forward Grasshopper would “focus solely on turning Grasshopper into a global communications company.” In early June, Grasshopper experienced a complete shutdown of its phone services for small and midsize businesses, and had to restore its data from its “rebuilt storage system.”
Grasshopper was founded in 2003 in Needham as GotVMail Communications LLC by Taghaddos and Hauser. The company changed its name to Grasshopper Group in May of 2009. In the past few years, Grasshopper Group has been reinvesting its profits into developing new products and spin-off companies through Grasshopper Labs.