Highview, a Madison-based provider of B2B cloud solutions, announced the company has completed its first seed round of $500,000 in funding.
Milwaukee venture fund CSA Partners LLC led the round. Esker — a software company providing AI-driven process automation and cloud computing, also of Madison, contributed 40 percent. Esker COO Steve Smith will join Highview’s board of directors following the deal, the company said.
Earlier this summer, Highview CEO and founder Mike Kersels announced the startup had entered into a strategic partnership with Esker to amplify their shared experience in SAP.
“The Esker partnership will allow us to leverage their industry-leading UI to present data in ways that will empower companies to base decisions on trend reporter and real-time dashboards,” Kersels said in a statement. “Our funding will also enable [Highview] to develop world-first innovations for our SAP customers, including Blockchain for EDI.”
With the fresh round of funding, the startup, formerly known as B/2BNOW, is actively pursuing clients who are transitioning from the legacy enterprise resource planning platform from SAP— the German software giant whose ERP product suite has become standard in the business world — which is discontinuing support of the service by 2025, in favor of moving customers to its SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
Kersels, a longtime vet of SAP delivery, and a former employee of the company, explained he launched Highview just over a year ago after identifying a “whitespace” within the industry, especially as traditional companies wait for S/4HANA products to mature and evolve.
“We saw a really good opportunity — customers were moving to the cloud, and the need for cloud-based B2B offerings weren’t there,” said Kersels, during a visit to Milwaukee’s historic Pritzlaff building, where CSA Partners is housed. “We saw this as the future of a long-term [business] strategy that has not wavered,” since SAP first launched its ERP software suite in the 90s, he said.
“It’s their biggest product launch since 1992,” he said.
Highview automates, integrates, and manages the exchange of critical business data between S/4HANA systems and external business partners. The company is the first SAP-certified B2B partner to assist customers with the integration globally, Kersels said.
Originally from California, Kersels said he has never been a coder or a developer, but enjoys solving business problems with technology, and thinking out of the box. His journey with SAP has been a long one; he’s held delivery leadership positions at both SAP and IBM over the past 20 years.
Kersels says launching his own business in Highview was a natural transition.
“It seemed like a fun gap to fill — I knew I could really network in that area, because [SAP] is like an extended family,” he said. “This is how companies are moving in the future.”
Kersels said the recent funding will help the company add two new developers to its nine-person team, and continue pushing its product to market.
“We’ve managed to get a lot of doors open” following the seed round, he said. “It’s been a lot of fun, and a lot of new challenges.”
The company is headquartered at StartingBlock in the American Family Insurance Spark building in Madison.
