Dave Duffield’s SaaS startup Workday announced today that they closed a fifth round of funding – a whopping $75Million dollars. If you are a small startup desparately struggling for seed or Series A or Series C funding of a couple of million dollars, this news should feel like someone pouring salt on a open wound. Dave Duffield and his co-founder Aneel Busri of all people were not short of funds but I guess, as they say, money follows money.

The new round of funding was led by New Enterprise Associates. The current investors Greylock Partners (Aneel is a partner there) and Duffield also participated.

Workday to date claims around 80 customer, of which a few are Fortune 500 companies. It made a splash with the large 200,000 user deal it stuck with Flextronics. But if you look at the list of customers it has on its site, all are small and medium businesses. There is no marquee customer it can boast of. Especially when Duffield says he is going after Oracle and SAP.  While Workday seems to have all the stars and getting the headlines, its main competitor in the SaaS HCM space SuccessFactors in the meanwhile seems to have great traction. Its customers list is 2700 customers long and includes large Fortune 500 customers.

So what would Workday do with $75 million dollars?

The press release on the company website says it will use the funds for product footprint expansion and supporting the companies expansion. If you go by the jobs listed on their website there are not that many positions open. So I am guessing the expansion would come in the way of some a yet-to-be-started hiring spree or some small acquisitions.

About Subraya Mallya

Subraya Mallya is a technology executive, entrepreneur involved in conceiving, building software businesses. In this blog, he focusses on business and technology strategies around Business Model, Product Development and Marketing. Connect with me on Twitter - @subrayamallya