Photo Credit: Outreach
Seattle-based Outreach is a rapidly growing sales engagement platform company that recently announced it raised $114 million in Series E funding at a $1.1 billion valuation led by Lone Pine Capital. Meritech Capital Partners and new investor Lemonade Capital (investment fund founded by Allison Thoreson Bhusri) also participated in this round.
Existing investors DFJ Growth, Four Rivers Group, Mayfield, M12 (Microsoft’s venture arm), Sapphire Ventures, Spark Capital, and Trinity Ventures also joined the round. Including this funding round, Outreach raised $239 million. Outreach was originally founded by VP of product strategy, Andrew Kinzer, CTO Gordon Hempton, and Wes Hather.
By surpassing a $1 billion valuation, Outreach has become the first and only unicorn (tech startup that reaches $1 billion market value through investments) in the rapidly growing sales engagement vertical. Outreach’s sales engagement platform uses machine learning for providing actionable insights to sales reps and it streamlines communication between sales teams and prospects. This leads to an increase in pipeline, sales cycle velocity, and close rate.
“Through market education and creating a product that delivers on the promise of an inherently better workflow for all customer-facing teams we have built the sales engagement category from the ground up and are uniquely positioned to leverage this momentum across the entire enterprise,” said Outreach CEO Manny Medina in a statement. “This funding will enable us to continue innovating directly for the end user, using the latest in machine learning and natural language processing to deliver a platform that is easy to use and provides immediate value through every action.”
With this funding round, it will support Outreach’s growth as the company plans to deliver a complete system of action “through a single pane of glass” for all customer representatives. As Outreach infuses each aspect of the customer journey with advanced machine learning techniques, Outreach is able to help organizations make better and faster decisions about their customers and take immediate actions that directly impact sales and the customer experience.
And the funding will enable Outreach to continue on the path for finding new and innovative ways to support, measure, and optimize customer-facing workflows and deliver more value for each customer rep.
“As enterprise SaaS veterans we have watched the sales engagement space evolve and grow into a critically important category that offers a compelling, hard dollar value proposition to customers. Outreach is the clear category leader in terms of technology, customer traction and vision and we are pleased to support their innovative vision for all customer-facing teams,” added Meritech Capital Partners managing director George Bischof.
Outreach is also planning to use the funding to expand as it plans to double its machine learning team and expand its international footprint. Plus the company is going to grow its partner ecosystem. Recently, Outreach announced an integration with Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 for Sales — which enables joint customers to leverage Outreach’s platform while syncing with Dynamics 365.
Forbes accurately predicted that Outreach would be one of the “Next Billion Dollar Startups” as it closed 2018 up 100% and now the company has 315 employees. About 450 employees are expected to be working at Outreach by the end of the year. Now Outreach supports more than 3,300 customer accounts and 50,000 sales professionals worldwide.
