Partech's portfolio company M-Files raised a $80m series C

By Bruno Cremel, General Partner 

Antti Nivala, Founder of M-Files

Today, Partech Growth’s portfolio company M-Files raised a $80m series C, an important milestone in its mission to grow as a leading software defining the category of intelligent information management. On this occasion, we wanted to share our journey as investors with the fantastic M-Files team and how it all started.
    
Our journey with M-Files: building a leader of intelligent information management

Wouldn’t it be great if you could access information, not ‘kind of’ based on where it is but ‘really’ based on what it is ?

The thing is that enterprise information is often stored in too many repositories and not classified well enough for that to be possible. When we first met Antti Nivala, founder and CEO of M-Files, five years ago, it was clear that he had at heart to solve this and that he had already laid foundations to do so. It is in foundations that M-Files actually found its origin: having been involved with his father’s construction business, M-Files was created by Antti Nivala as a homegrown solution to help the business better manage its documents. By the time we got to know M-Files, the solution proved to be so successful at unifying siloed information and documents, that it had been commercialized with success and already had an impressive footprint in Finland. By its ability to act as a layer on top of repositories and to automatically tag metadata relevant to documents based on context by leveraging A.I., M-Files gave us a glimpse of what the future of intelligent information management would be.

Convinced that this approach had a large and global potential and that it was time to accelerate M-Files expansion, Partech Growth led M-Files Series B with a €30m investment in 2016.  As growth investors, three themes marked our journey with M-Files.

SaaS transition

Soon after our investment, M-Files faced a critical strategic decision. Because of prudent approach regarding data, document management had barely started its transition to SaaS at time of our initial investment. M-Files sold mainly under a traditional perpetual license model and it was still uncertain what share of the market would eventually transition to cloud. Yet, there were early signs that the market could transition, and at a fast pace - those signs became stronger each month passing by,

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