Cloud accounting company Xero expected to pass through US$100 million in annualised revenue this financial year which would position it for a US listing, depending on market conditions, Xero CEO Rod Drury said.
“That puts you in the window (as) a credible listing on the US market,” Drury told the AGM last week.
Drury compared Xero’s rate of growth to other software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies, noting that it will take Xero eight years to reach US$100 million, the same amount of time it took ServiceNow, two years faster than NetSuite and Constant Contact and only a year or two slower than Salesforce.com and Workday.
Xero’s growth rate was impressive for two reasons, Drury said. “We’ve done this outside the US, which is amazing. Secondly we are one of the first companies that has cracked selling to small business,” Drury said. “Very few companies have managed to sell at scale to small business.”
The fact that Xero was the only company in that list that had made hundreds of thousands of sales to small businesses, instead of hundreds of enterprise deals, was a strong validation of its marketing and sales model, Drury said.
Xero’s other metrics were equally enviable. had hit operating revenue of NZ$70 million and annualised committed monthly revenue of NZ$93 million.
The company had reached 284,000 customers by March 31, up 45 percent in 2014, and had added another 50,000 customers by its AGM last week. The number of accounting partners had also grown 45 percent to 11,573.
Staff had doubled in 12 months to 758 to back expansion into the US and the UK, and Xero had NZ$210 million to invest in its overseas campaigns.
Xero forecasted subscription growth of 80 percent for the 2015 financial year.