KEY POINTS:
One of Sam Morgan's first investments after selling online auction site Trade Me last year is already taking off.
Morgan bought 7 per cent of the privately held Auckland firm Sonar6 last February, joined the board in March, and took 4.6 per cent more in August.
Sonar6 offers human resource managers a web-based program for charting staff performance. It has now scored a deal with The Warehouse worth about $300,000 a year.
Sonar6 is headed by founder Mike Carden. He came to Morgan's attention when his software was used at Trade Me.
Today Sonar6 has almost 30 clients including one in Britain. Carden hopes to sign up his first customer in the United States soon.
While he declined to put an exact figure on the deal with The Warehouse and its sister company Warehouse Stationery, he suggested it could be worth more than $300,000 a year based on an annual charge to clients of $100 to $200 an employee.
Sonar6's software will be used across all 85 of the Red Sheds and 46 Warehouse Stationery sites to help with the performance management of 3000 of its full-time staff.
Carden was not prepared to say what his company is valued at right now but a further call for investment capital to help it expand will force his hand later in the year.
"The exciting part at the moment is that we have moved quite quickly from a start-up into a reasonably stable business. We are not setting the world on fire with profit at the moment but we are not burning a lot of cash either.
"But as we expand into the UK and USA we probably will start to burn cash again and will go into another capital-raising round later this year."
Carden said he was not focusing on Australia at the moment and had yet to secure a client there.
"It is a viable market. But at this stage of the business we have to go after the biggest opportunities. Because we are a web-based business there is as much effort required for us to be successful in the UK as in Australia, and the UK is more receptive."
Morgan has also invested in iVistra Technology, a firm that specialises in "visualisation systems" - software that gives managers a graphic representation of how their business is performing.
