Blueprint, a global leader in requirements definition and management software, today announced the completion of a growth capital round of funding totaling $15.9 million. This round was led by a new investor - Tandem Expansion Fund, with the participation of existing investors from BDC IT Venture Fund, Walsingham Partners Fund, and several private investors. The money raised will be used to accelerate Blueprint's growth by expanding sales, marketing and channel partner presence and capacity in USA, Europe and Asia Pacific.

"We are delighted to have led this financing and believe Blueprint is well on its way to becoming the global standard in the burgeoning requirements definition and management software category within the Global 2000," says Alex Moorhead, managing partner at Tandem Expansion Fund. "We are impressed with the market and customer demand, along with the ROI Blueprint customers have experienced. We are confident in the Blueprint team's ability to scale the business in realizing its full potential."

"Today, IT departments are under tremendous pressure to deliver deeper software capabilities with less budget to support changing business requirements," says Roger Wilson, partner at BDC's IT Venture Fund. "The requirements definition and management software market is at a tipping point for explosive growth over the next two to three years as Business and IT leaders embrace powerful platforms like Blueprint that improve business and IT collaboration and finally close this major gap in the software development process that is costing the industry over $100B annually in waste and rework."

Developing complex software projects requires close collaboration between business stakeholders and IT who must agree on and manage multiple requirements through to completion. While projects increase in complexity, most Global 2000 companies still rely on Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and Visio drawings, all pasted into thick paper-based requirements files. This time-consuming, manual process is error prone, causes poor stakeholder collaboration and validation, and can result in ill-defined requirements that often change substantially during the project lifecycle. This legacy model can result in 30-50 percent project delays and budget overruns, significant scope reduction, poor end-user adoption, and escalating project backlogs.

Blueprint has changed that equation. Over the past five years, more than 200 customers - including major Fortune 500 banks, insurance companies, retailers, pharmaceutical companies and government agencies - have improved collaboration between their business and IT teams using Blueprint's patented requirements visualization and social features. The results - higher quality requirements and 30-50 percent faster on-budget delivery of truly usable software applications, along with dramatically reduced project backlogs.

"We have demonstrated that we can dramatically improve the software development performance of our initial set of Global 2000 customers, leaving us well positioned as a leading requirements platform as global demand takes off," says David Nyland, President & CEO of Blueprint. "For this we need to grow our presence in the US, EMEA, and Asia as well as through mature distribution channels such as HP's and Microsoft's partner ecosystem. We are now significantly strengthened by our financial partners who have validated our business plan and are supporting us with expansion capital to enhance our global penetration."

About Blueprint

Blueprint is the world leader in collaborative requirements definition and management solutions for companies looking to improve the success of critical revenue-generating projects. Blueprint transforms the business-IT relationship into a visual and engaging collaboration, enabling a unified approach that results in on-time, and on-budget applications. Predictable project schedules combined with faster time-to-market is critical to the competitive success of Blueprint's Global 2000 customers. Headquartered in Toronto, Blueprint has global sales, operations and partner presence. Visit http://www.blueprintsys.com