Ray Meiring

Ray Meiring is co-founder and chief executive of QorusDocs, a Bellevue, Washington, company whose software helps sales and bid teams write proposals, pitches and responses to requests for proposals (RFPs) inside Microsoft Office and Salesforce.

Writing Code as a Boy in South Africa

Meiring was programming computers by age 11, and by college he had completed tech projects for small companies in his hometown of Cape Town, South Africa, 425 Business reported in 2016. He founded his first software development company, Relate Technologies, in 2004.

Building the First Version for a Loan Client

The idea for Qorus came in 2008, when a client needed to produce a high volume of loan contracts and could not afford the software on the market. "We said we'd build (the software), but we wanted to build it as a project," Meiring told 425 Business. "We wanted to build it and own it." In 2009 he added Qorus and a link to its site to a Wikipedia article about creating documents, and within 48 hours someone at Vodafone in England clicked through and asked to see it. His laptop broke on the train to the meeting, so he drew the whole system on a whiteboard. "They loved that," he said, and Vodafone became the first major global client.

Meiring, Lee Child and Stephanie Laurent later spun QorusDocs out of their consulting business as a stand-alone software company after inbound demand arrived from Britain and the United States, he wrote in a WestRiver Group spotlight. By 2015 QorusDocs had narrowed its focus from general document generation to proposal management.

Moving Headquarters to Bellevue, Washington

Because most customers were in the United States, the founders toured American cities in 2014 and chose the Seattle area, close to Microsoft, re-establishing headquarters in Bellevue in 2015. Microsoft became a customer that year. "Microsoft was a huge win for us," Meiring said, noting that it had been using a competitor.

Raising Capital From WestRiver Group

In 2022 QorusDocs raised $10 million in a round led by WestRiver Group, bringing its total funding to $18 million, GeekWire reported. It had 70 employees and customers including Teladoc Health, Hitachi and CDW. Meiring described proposals as "the last yard before scoring a touchdown." He has since pushed generative AI into the software, writing that the technology "will completely transform the way we interact, particularly in how it empowers sales and business development teams."