mValent Raises $5M Series A Round

mValent Inc., a Tewskbury, Mass.,-based enterprise software startup, has closed a $5 million series A round of financing. The round was led by Charles Rivers Ventures and IDG Ventures – the venture capital arm of International Data Group, with each of the investors pitching in equal amounts of money to the round. The investors will take two seats of mValent’s board of directors.

mValent Inc is targeting the centralized IT units of large Fortune 500 companies as its customer base by developing products that enable these companies to achieve faster time-to-production for applications and to lower the cost of infrastructure maintenance.

“Our goal is to help IT professionals at these companies do their job better. Most Fortune 500 companies follow a hub-and-spoke model for IT infrastructure. Our solutions are targeted at attacking some of the crucial pain points in that system and helping corporations do business more efficiently,” says Swapnil Shah, president and CEO of mValent Inc.

Founded in October 2001, the company has spent the past 12 months defining a problem area to target and seeking investors for its business plan. The funding from this round will be used for research and development to convert some of its service customers into product customers. The company did not reveal any details about its products, which are still in early stages of development.

mValent will be seeking another round of private equity funding, but according to the company’s management the timing of that round will depend on the progress it makes on its products. “We believe that we can capitalize our business plan and get the revenue flow going and only then go in for another round of funding. How soon that happens is going to be a function of how well we do on our product development plan,” says Shah.