Xero to Intuit: I have $150M in funding, now gimme all your customers

Meghan Kelly for VentureBeat writes: Believe it or not, there is some drah-mah in the cloud accounting industry. Oh yeah, we’re talking dollars and data centers, here, people.  Intuit competitor Xero has set its crosshairs on Quickbooks, charging toward its U.S. business with a new round of $150 million.

Xero makes cloud accounting software and its main competitor is the Intuit-made Quickbooks. The company, which is based in New Zealand, has been gunning for Intuit’s business, positioning itself as the younger, less legacy-software-like accounting product. The company also boasts mobile device support, updated design, and what it thinks is better customer support.

In it’s announcement, Xero even calls out Intuit for “posting disappointing earnings,” saying the huge financial software company will “struggle to keep up with a cloud computing and mobile-driven world.”

Yikes.

The company thus far has had considerable growth in the U.S., bringing up its overall customer base 141 percent year over year. It first entered the U.S. market in 2011 and currently has over 210,000 customers worldwide. At VentureBeat’s CloudBeat conference this past September, Xero chief executive Jamie Sutherland announced that he and his team are coming up with a separate feature that will even help Quickbooks customers transfer over to Xero’s service in a few hours.

And it seems U.S. investors have a lot of that same faith in the company. Out of its $150 million round, $123 million were supplied by U.S. investors. Investors included Matrix Capital Management, Peter Thiel-backed Valar Ventures, and a suite of unnamed U.S. and New Zealand investors.

Xero was founded in 2006 and is listed on both the New Zealand Stock Exchange as well as the Australian Securities Exchange. Appropriately, it has offices in both New Zealand and Australia, but also has office space in the U.K., and the U.S.