Cherwell was founded in 2004 by Vance Brown, a former CEO of GoldMine, Arlen S. Feldman and Timothy G. Pfeifer. Cherwell launched Cherwell Service Management in 2007.
Venture Capital Investment
In November 2012, Cherwell received a $25 million investment from Insight Venture Partners in order to accelerate their rapid growth. The investment was highly unusual for the industry as in exchange for their capital investment, Insight Venture was only granted common stock in the company and did not receive control over day to day operations. CEO Vance Brown told the media that he structured this deal in order to "plan to retire doing Cherwell" and "not have to worry about having an exit strategy like competitors". On February 27, 2017 Cherwell secured a $50 million investment from KKR, a global investment firm. KKR is making the investment through its Next Generation Technology Fund, which focuses on investments in software, security, Internet, digital media, and information services. As of April 4, 2018, it was reported that Cherwell had raised $172 million from KKR since their original $50 million investment, and that KKR has become a majority owner.
Company Milestones
In January 2013, the Service Desk Institute accredited Cherwell Service Management as the "first service desk software solution in the world to be compliant with its international service desk metrics and reporting standard".
Products
The Cherwell Service Management platform is a suite of service management applications. CSM enables the rapid development of data-centric applications that can share a common data repository and utilize the same standard configuration tools. Users of the platform are also able to build custom applications on top of the same platform, using the tools and database that Cherwell provides. Cherwell has developed and sells applications designed in line with Information Technology Infrastructure Library methodology. Cherwell Service Management 5.0 was released in September 2014 and 6.0 in August 2015. The company has productized the following ITSM applications:
Incident Management
Problem Management
Change Management
Release Management
Knowledge Management
Service Level Management
Asset Management
Service Catalog Management
Service Request Fulfillment
Project Management
CSM server is available only for Microsoft Windows as is the main client interface. Cherwell had also developed the Cherwell Mobile applications for iOS and Android but they have since been retired as of September 2019.StrataCom Inc., a Cherwell Partner, released a mobile client and Kanban for Cherwell shortly after this. Cherwell develops Express Software Manager for IT Asset Management and Software Asset Management.
Board Members
On 4 June 2020, Cherwell Software invited to the Management Board Rob Salvagno, co-head of KKR's Next Generation Technology Growth team in North America, and Drew Harman, managing partner of Insight Venture Partners. Furthermore, Dave Welsh, a board member since 2018 and head of TMT Growth Equity at KKR, has been elected Chairman of the Board.
