This is the fifth and last post of a series about Talend’s recent Round C Fundraising.
Previous Post: Fundraising in November – Inking the Deal

There’s a risk even after you’ve signed a term sheet, but it’s minimized. It’s not a major hurdle, like valuation, but there are a lot of details to negotiate and again, it’s all about context. Q4 was a major quarter for us in terms of business and put us in a good position to reinforce our market position and viability.

The economy continued to deteriorate. The National Bureau of Economic Research declared that the U.S. was officially in the recession which, in hindsight, actually started in December 2007. Canada also announced that it was entering a recession. And the International Labour Organization said that as many as 51 million jobs worldwide could be lost this year because of the global economic crisis.

Then Bernie Madoff became the #1 news story, charged with masterminding what may be the largest investor fraud scheme ever carried out by a single person, posting liabilities of approximately $50 billion.

That was perhaps the last straw. Low-cost, high-performing, reliable, open source solutions looked very good to the investment community. Companies badly need to integrate data, but they don’t need expensive proprietary tools; especially when there’s an alternative like Talend.

We finalized our negotiations and planned the announcement for late January. The rest, as you know, is history.

This concludes my thoughts on the recent fundraising. I want to extend warm thanks and a huge vote of confidence to everyone – to Fabrice; to all employees; to the external partners who worked with me throughout this process. And thanks also to all the VCs I met with. It’s been an incredible experience.

You’ll be hearing from me on other topics very soon.

Bertrand