Tideway Systems, a UK-based start-up supplying IT configuration management software to financial services firms, has received $8.5 million in series A funding from Apax Partners.
The firm, founded in 2002 by Richard Muirhead, previously co-founder of telecoms software company Orchestream, was set up with seed capital from NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts), Esther Dyson of EDventure Holdings and John Taysom, founder and managing partner of RVC, formerly the venture capital arm of Reuters.
Tideway's flagship product - Foundation - has been developed collaboratively with customers and prospects in the global investment banking, retail banking and e-commerce sectors and was made publicly available in December 2003. The rack-mounted appliance is designed to create IT infrastructure blueprints for discovering and tracking network, server, database, application and business relationships.
Michael Chalfen, director at Apax Partners in London, explains the Tideway investment rationale: "Apax Partners conducts forums with major enterprise CIOs in both Europe and America. We have found that managing IT infrastructure better is a high priority for them, yet they lack coherent, current and complete information on it, and therefore any rational basis for enterprise systems management. Tideway has a uniquely scalable, easily deployable approach to solving this fundamental problem."
Tideway says the investment will fund the company to accelerate its research and development activities and to expand its implementation and customer support capability to meet growing demand.