Zimbra Has 4 Million Paid Accounts

Posted on November 3, 2006

TechCrunch profiles a company called Zimbra that has found success offering online mailboxes and collaboration software. Zimbra has 4 million accounts according to TechCrunch.

Founded in 2003 in San Mateo, California the company today announced that it has passed four million paid hosted and on-site mailboxes. That's a small but growing and very significant number compared to the 150 million plus seats sold by Microsoft Exchange. Assuming a basic price of $25 per seat per year (more for professional edition, less for standard edition in bulk) then 4 million paid users means Zimbra is probably doing at least $100 million in annual revenue. All of that is presuming these numbers are accurate, of course. That's pretty good for something that only a few years ago would have been unimaginable - an open source, Ajax rich, webmail, mobile and online collaboration suite. Zimbra took $16 million in funding from Benchmark Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Accel Capital.
We've profiled the moves toward a web based office by Google, Zoho, Microsoft and countless small startups. Zimbra includes a long list of features that other companies are just beginning to offer. Microsoft says that Exchange Server 2007 is due out at the end of this year or early next year; if it does in fact become available as a final release in that time frame it will be interesting to see if it can do what Zimbra can do.

Zimbra is much more than an email tool. It also offers features like document sharing. Zimbra's features include shared calendars, web document sharing, syncing with mobile devices, VoIP integrationa nd compatibility with office tools like Microsoft Outlook and Linux. Zimbra is also actually making revenues from paid subscribers which is unusual in today's Web 2.0 landscape.