Zuora
Zuora provides a leading monetization platform for recurring revenue businesses across all industries, enabling companies to unlock customer-centric business models. After starting with Zuora Billing in 2007, Zuora’s award-winning multi-product portfolio now includes Zuora Revenue, Zuora Collect, and Zephr, a Zuora Company. Zuora serves as an intelligent hub that monetizes and orchestrates the complete quote to cash and revenue recognition process at scale.
Zuora is proud to be a Pledge 1% Builder. We took the pledge in 2017 before we went public and committed to give back 1% of our equity and employee time to our communities. In 2019, we launched Zuora.org, which is part of our company and not a separate entity, to propel our pledge to action. Since 2019, we have committed $4 million worth of our Class A common stock to our Donor Advised Fund through the Tides Foundation. These funds are used to make grants to nonprofits around the world and support our employee giving and volunteering programs each year.
Fighting Climate change and preserving the planet through the Subscription Economy
To maximize its resources and have the greatest impact possible, Zuora has focused on building deep multi-faceted relationships with nonprofit partners that are aligned to the core of its business and provide opportunities for its employees to engage. This year, Zuora gave Village Capital, the largest supporter of impact-driven seed-stage entrepreneurs in the world, a $409,454 grant to support one of their accelerator programs. After conducting a deep landscape analysis, Zuora and Village Capital launched Sustainability Subscribed and selected a cohort of 9 startups, out of dozens, who were all focused on solving climate change using recurring revenue business models.
Sustainability Subscribed was focused on supporting startups with diverse backgrounds.
- 40% of the cohort was headquartered outside of US tech hubs (NY, CA, and MA)
- 40% have a BIPOC member of the founding team or C-Suite
- 70% have a female member of the founding team or C-Suite
The startups were focused on things like:
♻️ Reducing plastic waste
🧑🌾 Micro-climate forecasting to improve local agriculture yields
🥕 Reducing food waste
🌱 High tech soil carbon verification
✅ More effective deployment of green building incentives
💲 Establishing a carbon savings account via HSA/FSA like structures
🔌 An O/S for charging platforms
👚 Increasing textile reuse/recycling
⚡ Turning any lamppost into an electric charging station
During the 4-month accelerator, which was laser-focused on investment readiness, the founders had the opportunity to work with mentors, industry experts, investors, and ecosystem partners to develop the networks they need to scale their impact. Over 20 Zuora employees were engaged on the Advisory Board, as mentors, and/or as workshop leaders.
The final 2.5 day Program Summit was held at Zuora’s HQ in Redwood City. Tien Tzuo, Zuora’s Founder & CEO, joined Allie Burns, Village Capital’s CEO, for a fireside chat where he reflected on Zuora’s journey and shared advice with the founders. The event concluded with the 9 participant startups evaluating each other through an investor lens, using eight specific investment criteria that leverage Village Capital’s venture investment levels. Benchmark Labs and Voltpost were ranked “most investment ready” and each received $50,000 in grant funding from Zuora. The two companies are focused on the following:
- Benchmark Labs (San Diego, CA) the first and only solution to provide real hyper local forecasting, improving local agriculture yields and reducing the need for irrigation pumping.
- Voltpost (New York, NY) is retrofitting lamp posts into electric vehicle charging stations to democratize charging access, which is the primary barrier to transitioning to an electric car.
This is just the beginning for Zuora and Village Capital’s partnership!
Let’s here what it was like to participate as a mentor from Zuora employees:
"I was impressed with the passion of the entrepreneurs to make a true difference in climate change. The technology was also very interesting. Thanks to Village Cap and Zuora for supporting ZEOs to partner with these startups." - Ronak Majmudar, Head of GTM Initiatives
"It was a wonderful experience to connect with startups with outstanding sustainability subscribed visions blended with advanced AI technology. Very proud to know that Zuora plays a significant role in contributing to and supporting this program and startups." - Darius Jones, Director, Corporate Strategy & Operations
