Amsterdam-based SaaS scale-up Fast Four acquired by Insight Partners-backed Zone & Co

Amsterdam-based Fast Four, a NetSuite partner and SuiteCloud developer, announced on Tuesday that it has been acquired by US-based Zone & Co, a NetSuite development accelerator for lead-to-revenue software.

NetSuite ERP is an all-in-one cloud business management solution that helps businesses operate effectively by automating core processes and providing real-time visibility into operational and financial performance.

As part of the deal, the Fast Four team will join Zone. The Amsterdam-based company’s leadership team, including CEO Hylke Sluis, will focus on developing Zone’s global NetSuite presence and strengthening its services capabilities and SuiteApps platform, Zone Apps, built for NetSuite.

Helping ambitious companies grow

Founded in 2012, Fast Four claims to be the first NetSuite solution provider in the Netherlands. The company was founded by entrepreneurs who saw the ERP system of the future in NetSuite and an opportunity in the Dutch and Belgian markets to help companies make their way to the cloud.

Along the way, Fast Four also started developing SuiteApps to initially help their own customers use NetSuite more effectively, but these apps proved popular with other NetSuite customers around the world. They are now one of the largest SDN Partners in the world, with over 500 customers across their SuiteApps.

Co-founder and CEO of Fast Four, Hylke Sluis, says, “In the past two years we saw tremendous growth in our business. We welcomed hundreds of new customers and grew our team from 20 to 70 employees. We also opened offices in 6 countries and took our products to places that we would not have imagined two years ago. Now we want to accelerate what we started.” 

“To improve our products quicker. To service our customers even better. We want to grow our products and services with more expertise, experience and great people. To realise our ambitions we found the perfect fit in joining Zone & Co. A company with a similar background and a similar DNA. Together we will be bigger, stronger and better,” adds Sluis.

How will Fast Four’s acquisition help Zone?

With this development, Zone says it will rapidly advance the development of its ‘groundbreaking’ cloud software for finance teams, Zone Apps, built for the Oracle NetSuite ecosystem. The Zone Apps platform allows finance teams to eliminate time-intensive, retroactive manual work in favour of accelerated and automated forward-looking processes.

Zone Apps helps users to deploy and scale financial solutions across the business in NetSuite, enabling automation features inside NetSuite like any-way-you-want billing, advanced revenue recognition capabilities, third-party payment provider integrations, accounts payable, and more.

Derek Zanga, co-founder and President of Zone & Co, says, “Over the next twelve months, Zone and Fast Four’s plan, like our mission, is simple. We’ll be doing everything we can to accelerate SuiteApp and feature development, so that our existing product suite becomes faster, better, and stronger for our global customers while identifying use cases and customer needs to continuously add to our growing product pipeline.”

The addition of Fast Four’s product suite will further Zone & Co’s ability to accelerate the development of NetSuite products, reducing the friction and time required for customers to procure, implement and build out their NetSuite environments.

Billing, revenue and financials, all in one place

Zone & Co was founded in 2013 by Derek Zanga and Errol Fagone when they saw the untapped potential of NetSuite to handle advanced financial operations at scale. Their aim was to make life easier for finance teams by accelerating the development of cloud software built on the Oracle NetSuite platform, which supports over 28,000 businesses globally.

Recently, the company raised $76M led by Insight Partners in order to accelerate the growth of its premier SuiteApp, ZoneBilling, and the development of new advanced NetSuite products. Through this investment, the company will expand its market reach and bring efficiency and automation to NetSuite customers in almost any industry.