Northwest Innovation News has a press release out announcing Jive Software’s $12MM Series B follow-on round from Sequoia. From the release:

Portland-based Jive, a developer of social networking software for businesses, said this morning that it has raised $12M in a Series B round of funding. The round came from Sequoia Capital, the firm’s original backer. According to Jive, the new funding will go towards increasing its product footprint and for product development, as well as for sales and customer support. In a statement, the firm said the firm is profitable, and just saw its fourth straight quarter of record revenue growth. The new funding brings the company’s total raised to around $27.0M.

I like to see Northwest companies do well; and Jive has been on my radar for a while as being an example of a firm that focuses, pays attention to the customer, and executes well.

Congratulations on the extra cash – I’m expecting additional big news from Jive in the future.

About six weeks ago I mentioned how well Portland’s Jive Software was doing – lots of funding, paying customers, buzz, good critical press. Then I run across this tweet by Mike Arrington. Followed up by this one, which says:

@marshallk sometimes you gotta test the software, not just read the PR.

Hm. Is this Arrington’s normal grumpy cynicism showing up, or is Jive Software the new Broadvision? I haven’t actually used the software myself, so I can’t speak to it. What have you heard?

UPDATE: Good context post from Anthony Ha at Venture Beat here.

I first heard of Jive Software in November when they got a mention on John Cook’s venture blog at the Seattle P-I. They raised $15 million a few months prior, from Sequoia Capital no less.

They’re a competitor to SharePoint and you might remember how I feel about SharePoint. I love how Cook quotes Jive’s Sam Lawrence as saying SharePoint is a “Frankensuite”.

They’re at #7 on the February Portland Startup Index. They just got their 2,000th paying customer. They were recently named a runner-up in the 2008 IntranetJournal.com “Product of the Year” awards in the Collaboration category. They just added Tony Zingale of Mercury Interactive to their board.

Not too bad for a seven-year old company. I’m reminded of a recent post by David Rusenko of Weebly in which he talks about perseverance:

But you’ve got to keep with it to gain momentum. It doesn’t usually just build overnight, it takes time. Keep building your product, and eventually you gain momentum and a critical mass of people who know about you and tell others about you.

Keep it going, Jive!