As we approach a full year of turning our homes into functional offices and schools, the pandemic has forever changed the way we view work and education. WFH is now simply just work. The traditional office has been completely reimagined for the long-term and as a result, demand for technologies that enable and facilitate remote work and collaboration has soared. Splashtop, which allows users to access their desktop anywhere, at any time, and from any device, has benefitted from these global trends to emerge as one of this year’s first unicorns.
We initially invested in the team behind Splashtop–Mark, Thomas, Robert and Phil–back in 2010. What started out as a college friendship at MIT turned into a professional partnership two decades in the making and across multiple companies. Rarely do we see a leadership team that is as close-knit and has not only persevered through the ups and downs of building a company, but has truly grown closer and stronger together while doing it. This group of founders know the remote access space better than anyone and together, they truly define what it means to be a team.
What the co-founders have built is a company that delivers the best performing and the best-value amongst remote access, remote support and screen mirroring solutions. Splashtop’s products are used by more than 200,000 businesses and schools and more than 30 million users across over 800 million sessions. While these numbers are extraordinary, we believe that this is just the beginning for Splashtop. Splashtop is helping pave the way for the future of work and education and that’s why, 10 years after our initial investment, we’re excited to lead their $50 million Series E financing.
Best in Class Solutions = Explosive Product-Led Growth
Splashtop delivers its remote solutions via a fluid and smooth experience for users at a fraction of the cost of competitors. Customers love the product (4.8 stars on G2Crowd and 93 NPS) and historically, the business has spent very little on sales and marketing, including zero outbound sales effort to-date. In the past year, Splashtop’s 160%+ YoY growth has been driven by the increasingly popular product-led growth model. In other words, most of Splashtop’s sales have been and continue to be true self-service with product touch alone. What’s more impressive is that about 45 percent of trials become paying customers within just 7 to 14 days. Additionally, Splashtop delivers exceptional customer service (CSAT 90%+) which has resulted in consistent net dollar retention of over 115 percent.
As Splashtop sees demand skyrocket for its products, the market is ripe for remote access technologies. Largely driven by digital transformation, the rise of SaaS and a more widely distributed workforce across industries, disciplines and geographies, remote-work technologies that enable this new type of workforce are growing in popularity. And many of these trends are here to stay as nearly two-thirds of U.S. workers who have been working remotely during the pandemic would like to continue to do so. It’s no surprise that a recent McKinsey study on device enablement platforms for IT found that the market will reach over $19 billion by 2023. For these reasons, we believe Splashtop has a strong wedge with remote access, and will continue to expand its set of solutions to provide to their 30 million users around the world.
Making a Big Splash with Remote Learning
When schools shut down last year due to COVID, the majority of students faced disruptions in their education including being unable to access school and university computers in real-time. Computers at universities often use a specific combination of hardware and software that are not cloud accessible.
Splashtop’s high-performance remote lab access solution enables over 200 schools to provide seamless remote access from any device such as Chromebooks, iPads, Android tablets and personal laptops to students. Students get high performance, multi-monitor, audio and video streaming for Windows or Mac computers so that their learning experience is uninterrupted. Whether it’s work or school, Splashtop’s solutions provide seamless access in a remote environment so that employees and students can go on with their lives without skipping a beat.
Many Avenues of Growth Still Ahead
Splashtop undoubtedly benefited from the remote work and learning trend that was growing in popularity pre-COVID, but exploded during the last 11 months. We expect these trends to last far beyond the pandemic, and for Splashtop to continue to deliver best-of-breed remote solutions to employees and students.
Looking ahead, Splashtop plans to leverage this new round of funding to invest in and develop new avenues of growth including growing Splashtop for enterprise, launching new products in adjacent, but complementary areas such as collaboration and ZTNA (zero-trust network access) solutions, geographic expansion, new verticals and more.
We’re honored to have been already part of the journey together for the past decade, and are thrilled to continue our partnership with co-founders Mark Lee (CEO), Thomas Deng (EVP Product & Engineering), Robert Ha (COO), and Philip Sheu (CTO). We look forward to helping build a company of consequence by continuing our partnership with the team as they build solutions that will shape the future of work and education!
