Streamline Software Inc. is raising $1.5 million to fuel more growth as the Sacramento company is quickly signing on more government special districts across the country to its website platform that helps them comply with communications requirements.
In the past nine months, Streamline has doubled its number of customers from 700 in November to 1,400, said founder and CEO Mac Clemmens.
“We’ve been heads-down and busy,” Clemmens said.
When he spun the company out on its own last year, he was anticipating achieving positive cash flow early this year, but the growth in new customers was too strong, he said.
In the past few months he was seeking to raise $1 million by offering convertible promissory notes. The offering was oversubscribed to $1.5 million, mostly with demand from local investors, including the Growth Factory, a business accelerator in Rocklin.
The new money will be used to market Streamline's software across the country to its potential customers, Clemmens said.
He anticipates the company will be seeking a venture capital round early next year of between $4 million and $8 million.
Streamline has also doubled its employees from 20 last November to 42 people now, and it has moved from its Midtown Sacramento offices to a larger office in the Cannery Business Park in East Sacramento.
Streamline specializes in building and maintaining websites for special districts, like sewer districts, fire departments, utilities and other quasi-governmental agencies. It builds its sites in proprietary custom software. It charges special districts $1,000 a month for access to its software-as-a-service platform. The company has more than a 98% renewal rate from customers, which are located in 21 states.
Streamline initially started out to serve the 38,000 special districts across the country. Clemmens got the 38,000 number from U.S. Census Bureau. But it turns out the potential customer base is double that because property business improvement districts, joint powers authorities and entities organized under IRS Code 501(c)(3) are also potential customers because they also have open meetings and transparency requirements, as well as customer service needs.
The Streamline sites allow for functionality like posting agendas, meetings and transparency documents for the public agencies, as well as for accepting payments, form submissions and online signatures. A big part of Streamline’s offering is its Americans with Disabilities Act-compliant software engine. Just like buildings with stairs must have ramps or elevators to offer access to wheelchairs, it's required that websites need to be accessible to people with visual, audio or physical impairments. Streamline’s back-end for special districts has software that automatically checks a customer’s ADA compliance, and it coaches the operator on what things on the site need to be fixed to be compliant.
Clemmens started Streamline in 2015, building its first website for special districts. It had built 20 of them by the end of 2016 and it had 400 by the end of 2019 and about 700 in November last year. The company launched as a subsidiary of Sacramento web design firm Digital Deployment, but last year, it split off following the sale of the parent company to Planeteria Media of Santa Rosa.
