Baxter Planning gets $25M

Expansion infusion marks first time firm has sought VC funds.

Since its founding in 1993, Baxter Planning Systems has made itself into a leading maker of supply-chain software without raising any outside money.

Now the Austin-based company is ready for a new wave of growth and has landed $25 million to fuel it.

Polaris Partners, based in Boston, provided the funding, which will allow the company to invest in sales, marketing and development.

It will also enable Baxter to make a bigger push into international markets, said Greg Baxter, the company’s founder and CEO.

Baxter said bootstrapping the business was beneficial. “We really spent a lot of time working on the efficiencies and getting all the bits and pieces in place,” he said. “The good news is that has made us very efficient and we’re ready to scale on the operational side.”

Greg Baxter’s roots go back to Texas Instruments. While at Texas Instruments in the 1980s and early 1990s, he developed a streamlined process for managing worldwide spare parts inventory.

“I spent the last five years being responsible for worldwide planning and systems, and that’s where the idea came from,” he said.

In 1993, Baxter and his wife, Audrey, founded Baxter Consulting and Software from their Austin garage. Today the company

is a top provider of supply chain software that helps companies improve sameday inventory availability.

Customers include Johnson & Johnson, Stanley Black & Decker, Sony and Nokia. The company competes with major industry players like SAP and Oracle.

Baxter said the 55-person company has been approached by venture capitalists a number of times over the years.

“I was just hesitant along the way because we had gone down that path a few times and it never did quite feel right,” he said.

But now, he said, the company was at the point where “all the pieces were in place to really build out sales and marketing, and we felt like that’s something where we could really use the help.”

Polaris was the right partner at the right time, Baxter said. “The part I liked about Polaris is they were very conscious about maintaining our corporate culture. They’re not just about hyper-growth.”

Bryce Youngren, managing partner at Polaris, said, “Greg and his team have built a wonderful business that is an ideal fit for our later-stage practice: a founder-led, emerging category leader with a strong track record of profitable growth.”