Since its creation in 2006, KnowledgeTree has been developing its SaaS document management solution in a way that is quite unique. While the emphasis has been on document management, it has also underlined the social aspects of managing documents, and will use a US$ 4.75 million Series B funding round to continue this development.

KnowledgeTree and Document Management

We’ve come across KnowledgeTree many times since it moved from South Africa, where it was established, to North Carolina where it is now based, with regular updates to its products that aim to manage documents in very specific verticals like finance and legal.

However, KnowledgeTree clearly has its eyes set on bigger prizes and companies. It is expected that this round of funding will be used to try and maneuver its way into bigger enterprises that can offer it a large piece of a market that is extremely competitive to say the least.

In fact we have seen in the past that without a significant differentiator in this market, it can be very difficult to survive, especially given the fact that there are some real gorillas stomping around out there that are prepared to cut incomes to the wire to ensure customer wins in a generally depressed global economy.

However, this shouldn’t and hasn’t been a problem for KnowledgeTree to date, which offers a differentiator that can only become more popular in a business environment where social media is still only on the rise.

The differentiator comes with the application of social technologies to document collaboration and authoring in structured environments built around workflows, which include audit trails, activity history, versioning and threaded comments.

Already, it has a plug-in for Microsoft Word and has said in the past that it intends to offer a Web-based authoring environment that will enable users to work in much the same way as they do with Google Docs.

You can see in the current regulatory environment that we are living in at the moment why this might be popular with legal and financial companies.

KnowledgeTree’s Market

But it is clearly not the only player in these markets. We know that Google Docs has already a substantial customer base, while there are other players like SpringCM and Motive, not to mention the offerings of other large companies like OpenText.

Says CEO Daniel Chalef:

With the new funding, KnowledgeTree will rapidly scale our success in customer acquisition while evolving our product’s features to meet the market’s need for business-centric and social document management tools.

So more products, to build a bigger customer base. Currently KnowledgeTree charges on a per-seat basis with better deals as more seats are signed up.

This, the second round of funding in the company’s history was led by River Cities Capital Funds, Core Capital Partners, Hatteras Funds, and one of the original investors Hasso Plattner Ventures. More on this as more products come on line. Check out the video to find out more.