firstRain Names Penny Herscher President and CEO
Apr 11, 2005 - FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Stephanie Huff
firstRain, Inc.
415-235-2912
shuff@firstrain.com
firstRain, Inc. Names Penny Herscher President and CEO Company Strengthened with $10M+ in Additional Financing
(Foster City, CA.) firstRain, maker of Market IntelligenceTM software and services, signaled its commitment to growth by announcing the appointment of Penny Herscher as President and CEO as well as the addition of more than $10 million in venture capital. The funding was led by Ampersand Ventures. Herscher succeeds co-founder Gaurav Rewari, who is assuming the role of Chief Strategy Officer, and is partnering with Herscher to expand the company's product lines and drive growth.
firstRain offers the only comprehensive, end-to-end hosted application software solution available that gathers, monitors, analyzes and disseminates company, product and market intelligence. The company is headquartered in Foster City, CA and employs more than 80 people in its offices in New York City, Boston, New Delhi and Mumbai, India.
"The need for relevant and immediate market intelligence within business is exploding," said Rewari. "firstRain offers a truly unique solution to that need. We have the most comprehensive solution available to gather complex information, while at the same time the ability to analyze and report it in a user-friendly way that offers real value to the end user. We provide the crucial information decision makers, need so that they can spend less time searching for intelligence and more time making informed, strategic decisions."
Prior to joining firstRain, Herscher was Chairman and CEO of Simplex Solutions, an electronic design automation company. As CEO, she grew Simplex from a company with a few engineers in 1996 to a profitable software company with more than $50M in revenue that included most of the world's leading semiconductor suppliers in its customer base. She led Simplex through an IPO in 2001 and its sale to Cadence Design Systems in 2002. Herscher then worked with Cadence as Chief Marketing Officer and General Manager of a software division through 2003. Before Simplex, she was an executive at Synopsys for eight years and started her career as an R&D engineer with Texas Instruments and then Daisy Systems.
"I am very excited about this opportunity," said Herscher. "I was drawn to the company by a client roster that includes some of the biggest names in the pharmaceutical, financial and high tech industries. Plus," she added, "I get to work with the world-class team that developed the technology and solution to this point. By combining technical, strategic and management talent into one motivated team, we can help our customers quickly change the way they bring market information into their decision making processes."
Herscher serves on the boards of firstRain, the Anita Borg Institute and California Community Partners for Youth. She holds a B.A. with honors in mathematics from Cambridge University in England.
Major investors include Ampersand Ventures, Diamondhead Ventures, Myriad Investments and Split Rock Partners.