RJMetrics sold, split
Magento moves in, Stich spins off
2) The other 30 staffers are expected to stay with RJMetrics cofounder Jake Stein's new firm, Stitch, which is rolling out a separate "fully managed" new RJ-built service to handle the "soul-sucking" basic "plumbing" of building routine Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) software functions, so clients' high-paid software developers and engineers can focus on the higher-value-added design work.
Ownership: Magento was bought from eBay last fall by UK-based Premira, whose past U.S. investments include Informatica, eBay Marketing Solutions Genesys and Ancestry.com, among others.
RJMetrics, which fled a New Jersey taxpayer-subsidized Camden "innovation" center for Philadelphia as soon as it could afford to, once hoped rising sales would propel the company forward before seeking a buyer or even a public share sale (IPO).
Once sales and earnings growth slows, tech firm bosses turn to making a good exit, as RJ's founders know well: Before they started RJMetrics, Stein (a Wharton graduate) and Moore (a Princeton University and Glassboro High grad) were kid analysts at Manhattan's seminal software investment firm Insight Venture Partners.
Even with Radnor-based Qlik and other local software hopefuls sold, all hope of aggrandizement is not lost among emerging Philly-area firms.
Curalate, Apu Gupta's New Enterprise-FirstRound-Mentor Capital-backed social-media-data company, is the local software-growth firm of the moment, succeeding Monetate, RJMetrics and other earlier flavors.
Among the next wave, for example, "Archer, and Relay, from our portfolio seem to be on the rise, and we heard about Cright recently and trying to better understand what they are doing," notes Mike DiPiano, boss partner at NewSpring Ventures in Radnor.
Buyer Magento was previously owned by the former eBay Enterprise, King of Prussia-based successor to Michael Rubin's old GSI Commerce, which was split into four private-equity-owned successor firms (including KofP- and Georgia-based Radial and Wilkes-Barre-based Pepperjam) last fall.