Blog Category: Investment

We’re thrilled to announce today that we are leading UJET’s $55 million financing round. UJET’s cloud-native customer support software helps companies across all industries transform how they deliver multichannel support to customers in need. Pre-Coronavirus data shows that 56 percent of people have stopped doing business with a company because of poor customer service.The demand for fast, effective and personalized customer service has been growing for some time. We believe COVID-19 has accelerated the need for companies to adopt a platform like UJET as they tackle a massive uptick in inquiries due to cancelled flights, missing packages and more.

UJET empowers companies to reimagine customer support by providing them with an all-in-one platform that enables them to create intelligent workflows, make data actionable and create a modern business model that’s immersive, engaging and delivers a one-of-a-kind customer experience. We are looking forward to supporting UJET on their journey to revolutionize the customer support and contact center markets, and helping them build a Company of Consequence.

Here’s why Sapphire Ventures is excited to partner with UJET:

Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) takes customer support to new levels

Contact centers have been critical to customer service, sales and marketing workflows for the past three decades. Over the years, much has changed as the industry experienced several waves of technological innovation. The first wave took place in the 1980s and 1990s alongside the rise of telemarketing. Companies like Genesys and Avaya capitalized on the digitization of telephony by offering on-premise unified communication platforms to enterprises. 

The migration to the cloud triggered the next wave of innovative customer support companies led by companies such as  Five9 and Nice inContact. As seen with other enterprise software categories that have moved to the cloud like CRM, HCM and ITSM, cloud contact support has offered enterprises a flexible and scalable alternative to difficult to implement and manage legacy on-premise solutions. Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solutions have done well as more enterprises move their contact centers to cloud platforms, but the shift is still very much in its early innings. Five9 estimates that CCaaS solutions only have 15 percent market share because of the complexity of existing on-premise software used by companies with tens of thousands of customer support agents, but we are optimistic about the opportunity ahead.

We are now entering a new wave of innovation in the cloud contact center space where multimodal omnichannel and AI are key components of what’s next. We believe that UJET is building the next generation CCaaS solution with its highly scalable and reliable platform that brings together multiple channels of contextual data to provide personalized customer journeys and leverages AI to enhance agent efficiency–all in an effort to improve the customer experience. 

Most recently, COVID-19 tested call center operations, exposing platforms that are flexible and adaptable and those that aren’t. While technology refresh cycles typically happen eight to 10 years in this market, we believe that the pandemic has sped-up the need for more innovative and scalable CCaaS solutions like UJET. That’s why UJET is now powering the world’s largest cloud contact center with over 22,000 agents on a single tenant, enabling UJET to grow licenses by 400 percent in the last 12 months.

Voice, messaging and mobile are transforming the customer experience

Whether chatting with a service bot online or messaging a customer service rep in-app, customers today rely on multiple channels to reach support agents. UJET goes beyond voice and IVP customer support, enabling companies to engage with their customers on the channels they prefer including web messaging, text, in-app and more. 

UJET also offers mobile features unlike we’ve seen before such as user authentication via a smartphone camera to enhance customer interactions and increase support efficiency. On the agent side, UJET’s integrated omnichannel solution connects the customer to the right agent quickly. While customers wait to connect to an agent, UJET offers features like Wait-Time Messaging (automated information requests while on hold) and photo or video requests (sending media directly to agents) to reduce the time it takes to resolve an issue. Companies that are able to provide seamless, differentiated and speedier customer support improve the overall experience, resulting in brand loyalty. That’s especially the case in times of high stress as seen more recently.

AI-powered virtual agents are expected to dominate contact centers

We recently heard Five9 say that 90 percent of all customer support cost is spent on labor and only 10 percent on software. When looking at these figures it’s easy to understand why virtual agents invoke so much excitement. Compared to the earlier generation of this technology, virtual agents today are far more sophisticated, benefitting from NPL and NPU advancements in the last few years. In fact, Gartner predicts that 40 percent of contact center interactions will be fully automated by 2023. Because virtual agents alleviate much of the total cost involved in delivering quality customer support, innovative companies are in the process of rolling out these in-demand solutions. Soon-to-be released, UJET is developing its own virtual agent for automating customer support interactions that will reflect UJET’s mobile-first approach by leveraging smartphone capabilities. More to come here!

Differentiated leadership and a committed team

Time and time again, the companies we’ve seen succeed in their journey to become a Company of Consequence typically have a differentiated founder and team. UJET’s founder and CEO Anand Janefalkar doesn’t have a contact center industry background. His story is unique in that he was compelled to start UJET because of an extremely poor experience he had with customer support and call center agents. He persuaded Joerg Habermeier who was previously at Facebook to join his company as VP of Product, and hired engineers from cloud-native and cloud-scale companies to rethink how to build a cloud-native, cloud-scale and mobile-first CCaaS platform. Most recently, UJET brought on Darcey Harrison as the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), Vasili Triant as the company’s Chief Business Officer (CBO) and Baker Johnson as VP of Marketing to round out their go-to-market (GTM) team and help the company grow to the next level.

“We’re very excited to partner with Sapphire Ventures, a well-known and respected VC firm that’s known for its enterprise software investments,” said Anand Janefalkar. “Since meeting earlier this year, the Sapphire team has been energized by what we’re doing in the customer support space, and has been committed to our vision. This round of funding will allow us to drive product innovation, build out our go-to-market strategy and support our growing customer base during this unprecedented time in history and beyond.”

With this new financing round and with the support from Sapphire’s Portfolio Growth team, we’re excited to see UJET continue to help enterprise customers provide best-in-class customer experience by driving adoption of its cloud-native and mobile-first contact center and customer support platform.

We are excited to announce today that we are leading Series E $80 million financing in Contentful. We have known Contentful for more than six years now and this is Sapphire Ventures’ second investment in the company after having led the Series D financing round in 2018. 

Investing in companies during unclear economic times can be tricky, but as a venture capital firm, we’re familiar with making investment decisions amidst uncertainty–everything is a trade-off between risk and return. Still, a global pandemic like this one is an exogenous shock that puts a big wrench into that equation. So, what gave us the confidence to once again invest in Contentful? The short answer is, Contentful has grown substantially, as has market demand, since our initial investment.

5 reasons why we’re excited about Contentful

Agile content management is now mainstream

Since pioneering headless CMS six years ago, Contentful has been transforming how companies manage and deploy content across channels. Early on, Contentful’s API-first solution targeted developers who became early adopters. As the company built a strong following among developers over the years, creative, marketing and c-level stakeholders became aware of the advantages of a modular and flexible content architecture. 

Today, digital is quickly becoming the premier channel for every business. And while the web is foundational, the proliferation of mobile, social, voice, virtual and augmented reality require a cross-channel approach to content. Executing a cross-channel content strategy requires a modern and agile content management platform like Contentful. Traditional CMS suites are page centric, built for websites, have a monolithic core and are architected for single servers, which is why more enterprises and digital natives prefer to assemble a modern tech stack out of best-in-class components, over an integrated CMS suite.

Contentful has evolved into a platform of services

Within the Contentful solution, content is organized flexibly in modular pieces making it adaptable, channel independent and reusable. The cloud native architecture enables decoupled and scalable management of content delivery, and the API-first approach enables strong integrations with third parties. 

Building on the extensibility of its platform, Contentful released the App Framework earlier this year, which enables programmatic scaling of digital experience services such as optimization, analytics, collaboration and translation. This provides more agility and flexibility for teams, while enhancing the robustness of content operations governance. These characteristics make Contentful future-friendly and an integral part of the next-generation Digital Experience Platform (DXP) stack.

The company built the largest partner network in the industry

Contentful’s growing ecosystem consists of 300 partners, including solutions partners, technology partners and top global agencies. Digital agencies and system integrators such as Accenture, Publicis, Huge, Valtech and AKQA are leveraging Contentful to help customers build unique and consistent digital brand experiences across devices and channels.

Steve Sloan came on board as the new CEO

About a year ago, Contentful’s co-Founder Sascha Konietzke made the decision to move away from his CEO position into a more strategic one as Chief Strategy Officer. Following a very careful and intentional search, the company brought on Steve Sloan to lead Contentful as CEO. Steve was a fantastic fit right away. He connected with Sascha and co-Founder Paolo Negri instantaneously, and for the last several months has been focused on expanding upon their original vision.

A leadership change is never easy, always risky and not something boards take lightly. Eight months into Steve’s new role, and I don’t think any of us could have wished the transition to have gone any better. Steve has impressed me in a big way–not only with his insights and sensibility during the process of winning over the teams in Berlin and San Francisco, but also with the great leadership he has shown in this time of crisis. 

A number of seasoned executives joined Contentful

Since our Series D investment in Contentful, the company has hired eight senior leaders, including Steve. We are impressed by the exceptional talent these individuals bring to the table, and by how they have naturally come together as a team.

• Margo Smith (formerly Snowflake) – Chief Legal Officer 
• Bridget Perry (formerly Adobe) – Chief Marketing Officer
• Vanessa MacIlwaine (formerly Getaround) – VP, Head of People
• Saood Shah (formerly Gainsight) – VP, Customer Success and Professional Services 
• Jeff Glasson (formerly Cloudera) – VP, Engineering 
• Kevin Zellmer (formerly PatSnap) – VP, Partnerships
• Benjamin Keyser (formerly Zendesk) – VP, Product 

While the business impact of the pandemic is uncertain, I think it will create opportunities for some companies, particularly those that embrace digital-first strategies, to become stronger and outperform their competition. We believe Contentful is one of those companies–a company we believe to be of consequence. 

The way I see it, Contentful has all of the necessary ingredients to be successful: an agile and differentiated platform, a large developer network, robust ecosystem of partners and a world-class team. This, coupled with the tailwinds for digital that has been more recently amplified by the crisis, makes us optimists for the long term and the future of Contentful.

We’re excited to announce today that we’re leading $30 million Series B financing for Uptycs, a start-up that’s revolutionizing security analytics by providing enterprises with a SQL-based security analytics platform for performing intrusion detection, vulnerability management, incident investigation, workload protection, security audits and compliance checks. Uptycs is able to do all this across a company’s server endpoints (such as Linux VMs and containers) within data centers, cloud providers like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, and productivity endpoints such as macOS and Windows.

A cumulation of several trends has driven the need for cybersecurity solutions like Uptycs. Firstly, to address the growing threat of cyber-attacks, enterprises have increasingly been running agents from siloed security applications. In addition, the emergence of ephemeral workloads in modern infrastructure has caused the amount of security telemetry (hence noise) to explode. Enterprises have also seen a demand to protect non-Windows operating systems, such as macOS on productivity endpoints and Linux on cloud workloads. And more recently, mandated remote work has increased security risk, making products like Uptycs mission critical.

Uptycs pairs Osquery, a best-in-class open-source endpoint agent, with a proprietary SQL-powered analytics platform to enable a unified view of server workloads and endpoints across heterogeneous environments (like the public cloud, on-premise, laptops and more) for security analytics and performance monitoring. Inspired by how Salesforce and SAP have changed the CRM and business process industries with SQL based applications, Uptycs built a platform that uses SQL to extract operating system information with Osquery agents as tables and relational databases, and translates them into security analysis use cases and eventually, performance metrics visibility.

With the new funding, we’re excited to see Uptycs continue to support its enterprise customers, augment its marketing and sales capabilities, improve product development and expand product capabilities. Meanwhile, our Portfolio Growth team, will be supporting Uptycs in its mission to help modern enterprises adopt its SaaS-based approach to using Osquery for security analytics and performance metrics of cloud workloads and endpoints.

Making security analytics accessible since its founding

Uptycs was founded in 2016 by Ganesh Pai (former chief architect at Akamai Technologies), Uma Reddy (former VP of engineering at Sonus) and Mike Hluchyj (former CTO, carrier products at Akamai), who currently serves on the company’s board. Their goal was to make security analytics easily accessible—especially for enterprise customers that are faced with a massive shortage of cyber-security talent. According to Cybercrime Magazine, there will be approximately 3.5 million unfilled cybersecurity jobs by 2021.

Uptycs addresses the shortage in security talent by using Osquery, an open-source agent developed at Facebook that allows users to write SQL queries to explore operating system data for security analysis and for obtaining performance metrics. Uptycs is growing in popularity among enterprises because its SQL-based platform makes it easy and accessible for someone with the ability to write SQL code to easily become a security analyst. Having seen the adoption of SQL-based analytics tools like Looker, a previous Sapphire Ventures investment, we believe that Uptycs is on the right path to democratize the market for security analysts, making it much more accessible.

A quickly growing market opportunity

When looking at the overall cloud security market, we see an impressive opportunity for growth—for the industry and specifically, for Uptycs. Recent data from Grand View Research shows that the cloud security market size is expected to reach $12.63 billion (13.9% CAGR) by 2024.

We believe enterprises will adopt security solutions like Uptycs for their security needs because of its easy-to-use, open-source based approach. As we look at the technology landscape, open-source platforms are gaining more and more traction because they’re distributed widely, embraced by developers and allow for collaboration across enterprises. In addition, open-source agents reduce blind spots, especially for cloud workloads.

Helping customers secure their systems

It’s not enough to deploy an open-source Osquery and collect an onslaught of system activity. That’s why customers are turning to Uptycs to help answer: “Now what?”

The Uptycs security platform uses data across the entire fleet of Osquery agents to run correlations and identify anomalous activity. The platform is capable of managing and contextualizing system data from 50 to 500,000+ endpoints—providing the who, what, when and where at the individual- server workload and laptop levels.

Uptycs has already seen success with its enterprise customers.

• Provides API for payment processing: Deployed on mostly macOS laptops, Uptycs eliminates the need to recreate detection and alert logic every time a new tool is added. The Osquery API helps enterprises with tool consolidation—they just punch a few lines of code and get the data they need immediately.
• Integration focused ISV: By using Uptycs, the company was able to complete a comprehensive asset audit for compliance requirements on all their 1000+ servers.
• Next-gen DevOps provider: Working with a remote team, Uptycs was tapped to manage assets and ensure device authentication and authorization. This solves such problems as determining whether or not a user is authorized to log in at 4a.m. from Europe.

Trusted Uptycs leadership and industry expertise

Although we feel vendor fragmentation and marketing hype create challenges in understanding the differentiated value that security companies deliver, we firmly believe security is critical to the success of every company, and Chief Information Security Officers who have a lot of purchasing power would agree. We’re hyper-focused on investing in startups like Uptycs that not only provide a differentiated product, but are evolving into a platform.

We’re also excited about the Uptycs team. Co-founders Ganesh Pai, Mike Hluchyj and Uma Reddy have been working together for more than 20 years. They know the security industry incredibly well, have a proven track record of working together and create great technology products. Ganesh, Mike and Uma sold their first company, Verivue, to Akamai. After two years at Akamai, the co-founders and their talented engineering team decided to start their second company together, Uptycs. This time, with a bigger, more relevant challenge to work with.

We’re thrilled to be a part of this journey with Uptycs. Here at Sapphire Ventures, we have a long history of partnering with Boston-based companies, including the likes of DataRobot and CloudHealth (acquired by VMware), and we’re pleased to add Ganesh and Uptycs to the portfolio. We are all looking forward to helping build another company of consequence with Ganesh and his team!

Amidst these unsettling and turbulent times, Sapphire Ventures has some positive news to share. Today, we’re excited to announce our investment in CircleCI, a leading DevOps company founded in 2011 by Paul Biggar and Allen Rohner, and currently led by CEO Jim Rose, that empowers software teams to easily build, test and deploy applications on multiple platforms. CircleCI has raised $100 million in Series E financing, bringing the total amount raised to date to $215 million. 

We’re thrilled to invest in CircleCI because of its leadership in the DevOps space. DevOps is an industry that we anticipate will grow exponentially as more and more businesses across all industries become software-first companies and turn to applications to engage their customers. A recent Fortune Business Insights report validates our thinking, predicting that the DevOps market will reach nearly $15 billion by 2026. Within DevOps, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) tools such as CircleCI are expected to see the greatest budget allocations because of their ability to help teams shorten the software development cycle and quickly release code with confidence.

Today’s companies are challenged with having to rapidly release new software that’s needed to meet the high demand for new apps. We believe this demand will continue to grow as the number of people who access and use apps will increase with the ongoing proliferation of mobile devices. But the traditional waterfall approach used to release new software to build apps no longer works for software development and deployment teams. They don’t have the time to wait for each development process to be completed before working on the next. DevOps changes the game for these teams with a new holistic approach that encourages collaboration and communication. With DevOps, software development and deployment teams are able to accelerate the pace of work, accommodating faster release schedules while also improving quality.

An essential part of DevOps, CircleCI enables teams to quickly release trusted code by automating the build, test and delivery process. CircleCI has set itself apart as a market leader in the CI world by helping software teams automate low impact work, scale with parallel execution and support for containerized environments, get going instantly with out-of-the-box compatibility with new frameworks and legacy code and reduce the complexity involved with managing cloud or on-prem environments.

In addition to seeing the value of CircleCI’s product, we feel we’ve had a wonderful relationship with CEO Jim Rose. We met Jim a little over four years ago during his Series C financing. He is a serial entrepreneur who has lived through the struggles of legacy DevOps before CircleCI. Together, with founders Paul Biggar, Allen Rohner and the broader CircleCI team, Jim’s deep commitment to enabling the developer has driven CircleCI to take modern DevOps to a new level in this competitive industry. We’re also enthusiastic about continuing Sapphire Ventures’ track-record of investing in companies in the developer and DevOps market alongside JFrog, MuleSoft, Auth0 and InfluxData.

“We’re thrilled to have Sapphire Ventures support our Series E financing round. The Sapphire team has decades of experience in the enterprise software market and deep expertise in the DevOps space that will be invaluable for us as we continue to grow our business,” said Jim Rose, CEO of CircleCI. 

Since CircleCI’s Series D funding round last July, the company has made significant strides in growing its platform, improving the core product and expanding globally. Since July, CircleCI has added Windows support as part of its platform, integrated CircleCI orbs into more than 22,000 organizations, opened a new office in London and has brought on new customers such as Aetna, American Express and Unilever. CircleCI already works with thousands of companies, including Samsung, Ford Motor Company, Spotify, Lyft and BuzzFeed.

We recognize these are difficult times, but CircleCI is hiring! Check out the careers page for more information: https://circleci.com/careers/

Consumers are nowadays looking for experiences when they shop, go to restaurants or stay at a hotel. Psychological studies show that consumers are happier when they spend their money on experiences rather than purchasing things. Consumers, therefore, are demanding highly-tailored experiences and customer service from the brands they shop with.

To provide hyper-personalization in real-time, a brand, retailer or restaurant needs a deep understanding of its product/service usage and customer data. Most retailers, restaurants and brands have accumulated a lot of data but very few are leveraging it to their full potential. We are excited to be co-leading Punchh’s Series C financing since it’s one of the few companies that is using AI/ML on this data to not only provide very valuable customer insights but also enabling brands, restaurants and retailers to acquire and retain customers.

Punchh’s solutions enables a brand or a retailer to build a holistic view of who the customer is in real time, and based on that view, create a meaningful and  ongoing relationship with the customer. Once this connection is created, a brand or retailer can keep them as a loyal customer forever and build a very profitable business relationship.

Although a brand or retailer has all the customer data including purchasing behavior from the POS, online purchasing data, CRM data and loyalty/email engagement data; it often only exists in silos. Moreover, the marketing and customer acquisition departments in most brands/retailers are quite siloed as well since there are different teams for online vs. in-store and there is no sharing of information or customer data between them. Punchh is able to ingest data into its platform from all these silos including data from POS in physical locations, ecommerce platforms, email engagement data from SendGrid/MailChimp and CRM data from Salesforce/SAP Hybris/Microsoft Dynamics and provide retailers and brands an unparalleled understanding of how their customers engage with them online and in-store. The company is able to use its AI/ML-powered models to enable the different online and in-store teams at brands/retailers to work together to target and acquire these customers with pinpoint accuracy and create a unique and custom experience for the customer which keeps them coming back.

Since originally investing in Punchh in 2018, we at Sapphire Ventures have believed that Punchh is very strategic for brands and retailers to figure out which customers have the highest lifetime value, which customer personas they should be pursuing, how to acquire them and how to keep them engaged. We are very excited to back the Punchh team again because the company’s products will play a significant role in helping brands and retailers win in this hyper-competitive environment by using customer data effectively and providing then with both an immediate lift in revenue and, more importantly, sustained long-term growth.

Just about every pitch meeting, presentations include terms like “AI” or “machine learning” or “natural language understanding.”  Yes, this is likely driven by VCs’ appetite to invest in businesses leveraging these technologies, but in our experience it’s rare that companies are actually deploying them. That is why today I am thrilled to announce that Sapphire Ventures is partnering with Moveworks on their $75M Series B. Moveworks and their excellent  co-founding team proved every step of the way they were the real deal, and had actually built and deployed the latest and greatest in natural language understanding and machine learning to elegantly solve business and end-user pain points. More on why we invested:

Why Sapphire Partnered with Moveworks?

Moveworks is led by CEO Bhavin Shah, who inspires confidence with all those around him, and has experience building SaaS companies. More than just Bhavin, the uniqueness of the team is really driven by the individually brilliant, and complementary nature, of the four co-founders of Moveworks – Bhavin Shah, Jiang Chen (VP Machine Learning), Varun Singh (VP Product), and Vaibhav Nivargi (CTO).  Jiang, Varun and Vaibhav have proven technical chops from consumer-grade companies like Google and Facebook, but are also able to understand the business problem they are tackling and articulate why what they have built is necessary and special. Most of all, we enjoyed learning about them on a personal level over dinner and countless other meetings. We prefer to work with great people, in addition to talented professionals.

Moveworks provides automated support for employee questions and requests, beginning with IT tickets. They can fully resolve – truly autonomously – a significant percentage of tickets and consistently show improvement in their resolution rates across their customers over time. Importantly, unlike many other “conversational AI platforms”, there is no drag-and-drop toolkit needing weeks or months of implementation to set up every conversational flow possible. Instead, Moveworks leverages actual natural language understanding underpinned by a host of models to provide a truly automated solution. Sapphire has an extensive set of relationships with CIOs and IT leaders that we introduced to Moveworks and we received significant, positive feedback about time-to-value and the ultimate ROI from the solution. We think Moveworks is just scratching the surface in its potential to automate access to information and knowledge through the most natural interface, conversations and chat.

Bhavin Shah, CEO, Moveworks

Why Moveworks Partnered with Sapphire Ventures?

Building Moveworks has been one blessing after the next. Over the past 6 months, dozens and dozens of investors reached out to us curious to learn more and to understand if we were considering a new round of capital. Some heard about us through the Silicon Valley grapevine; others spoke to our customers and were both impressed and intrigued about how we built a true AI solution solving real enterprise problems. But most reached out without having done their homework, and made little effort to understand our business and the nuances that make our approach and technology so powerful. 

Rajeev Dham and the Sapphire team were very different. It was immediately clear to us based on their portfolio and knowledge of AI and enterprise tech that they would be great partners. They researched our market, spoke to key customers, and deeply understood our differentiation. The very first meeting was like speaking to a member of our team. They shared our passion and clearly understood why our product works, and why other solutions have failed in the past.  

The Sapphire team has one of the most impressive CIO networks in Silicon Valley — and they were proactive in making customer intros. They were the only firm that made unsolicited introductions for us to prospective customers — many of which became Moveworks customers in record time — even before we discussed term sheets and fundraising. Their Portfolio Growth Team is one of the most engaged with deep relationships at 1000s of enterprises. Partnering with them was an easy choice.

Thanks, Bhavin, and cheers to the full Moveworks team!  Sapphire is very excited to work with you to build Moveworks into a company of consequence!

I’m pleased to announce that Sapphire Ventures has led the Series C funding round for Side, a leading real estate technology platform that addresses a large and underserved portion of the $27 trillion residential real estate market.

Disruption in Real Estate

These are exciting and tumultuous times for the U.S. residential real estate industry.  Over the past 10 years, Zillow, Trulia, and others have empowered consumers to make informed decisions about the very important process of finding a place to live,  At the same time, they’ve helped entrepreneurial agents connect with transaction-ready consumers and grow their businesses.  

More recently, startups like OpenDoor, Offerpad, and Knock — joined by powerful incumbents like Zillow and Redfin — have innovated on the core real estate transaction, bringing IBuying and other alternative transaction models to home buyers and sellers in cities across the U.S.

Amid this upheaval, though, there’s an equally impactful, but far less discussed, trend: the rise of agent teams.  There are over 1.3 million real estate agents in the US of varying size and skill.  The top 10% of agents — those who generate $15m per year in home sales and up — are responsible for a substantial and growing portion of this massive market.  

These top-producing agents are often brilliant entrepreneurs that stand out from the pack — delivering excellent client service, building strong personal brands, utilizing online marketing and other technology to generate new clients, and largely running their own independent businesses inside brokerages across the country.  As the traditional brokerage model struggles to keep up with agents’ increasing demands in an ever-changing tech-driven landscape, top-producing agents and powerful agent teams have become dissatisfied with the value they receive from traditional real estate brokerages, and are looking for better alternatives. The real estate brokerage industry is massive, and is in desperate need of reinvention.

Enter Side: Growth Platform for Agent Teams

Side is a real estate brokerage technology platform that helps top-producing agent teams :

• Own their own business and brand:  Side encourages and supports agents to launch their own brand, and exclusively own their client base.  There’s no misalignment between what’s good for the agent, and what’s good for their brokerage since it is one in the same.  Side’s model helps agents grow faster, attract associate agents to their team, and build enduring equity that they own.
• Access market-leading technology:  Side offers a robust lead-to-close technology platform.  Side’s product development team has built new components where none exist, and in other cases they’ve integrated excellent technology that’s already available.  The result is a complete, easy-to-use suite that helps agents focus on serving clients, and not worry about the underlying tech that powers their business.
• Receive comprehensive support:  Side’s experts help top agents develop business plans, create their own brand, find office space, execute marketing programs, and of course process transactions.

Side works with top-producing, growth-focused agents.  In fact, Side’s average partner agent executes 36 transactions per year, significantly more than any other brokerage.  With Side, the brand of the agent or team is front-and-center. In the background, Side is the broker of record and earns a percentage of customers’ commissions.  It’s a winning value proposition that is attracting top agents and teams at an accelerating pace.

Side CEO Guy Gal is one of the smartest and most driven founders I’ve met in the Proptech space, and he and co-founders CTO Ed Wu and Hilary Saunders have surrounded themselves with an extraordinary team.

Companies of Consequence

At Sapphire Ventures, we invest in companies of consequence: ambitious and talented teams, pursuing large market opportunities, with an innovative approach.  I’m very pleased to partner with Side’s exec team to build a company of consequence in this exciting space.

The B2B revenue process has changed dramatically in recent years. Buyers are more informed, armed with information gathered from many sources before engaging vendors. New subscription and consumption-based business models require different management and measurement approaches, and ever-increasing competitive pressure and accelerating pace of change requires B2B teams to be much more agile than in the past. 

The rise of revenue operations 

All of these dynamics highlight the need for a different approach to managing the modern revenue process. To respond to these changes, innovative companies are combining their marketing, sales, and customer success teams into a single business function called revenue operations (or RevOps). The purpose of this new alignment is to create more transparency and accountability between team members as they work towards their shared goals of customer acquisition, retention, and account expansion- i.e. the levers that accelerate a company’s top-line growth.

Pendo, and Contentful. As business leaders eliminate inefficiencies and try to find new ways to create more relevant and satisfying experiences for their customers, they are focusing on how to make revenue operations teams work more cohesively and efficiently. Recent data shows that companies with formal revenue operations teams grew sales 3X faster in 2019 than those who didn’t — and public companies with revenue operations teams had 71% higher stock performance.

Although revenue operations has become one of the fastest growing roles in enterprise sales, the technology to support it has lagged behind.  It’s relatively easy to find tools that empower marketers, sales reps, and customer success teams to do their jobs faster and with greater attention to detail. But to bridge these teams and bring their different tech silos together, organizations typically have had to cobble together hand-coded spreadsheets, custom reporting and manual processes.  

A new way to revenue 

Clari, the latest addition to the Sapphire Ventures portfolio, anticipated this problem and has been working to solve it since its inception. The company’s powerful platform offers complete visibility into which leads in the pipeline will turn into customers and which customers at risk for churn or are primed for upsells. It even provides finance and operations teams insights to improve forecasting accuracy, and measure sales and marketing team productivity. In essence, Clari provides a single view and shared set of workflows for a company’s go-to-market operations — yet its ability to harness AI and machine learning to improve them truly sets the system apart.

Clari works alongside its customers’ existing marketing automation system, CRM, emails, calendars, and other repositories of revenue information and uses its AI/ML to automatically associate and bi-directionally sync each data point with its correct account and opportunity. From there, it generates valuable insights on active and potential deals and highlights how sales reps and marketing campaigns are engaging with these leads and prospects. Clari can help sales leaders coach reps on how to allocate their time and improve their communications to close more deals in less time. It also ensures that the team has a full picture of every contact, aggregating information from every customer touchpoint into a single, comprehensive, and easily accessible view.

Since its inception, Clari has raised $75M from investors — including its last round of $35M (less than a year ago). It’s grown both customer count and employee count by 100% YOY — and shows no signs of slowing down.

We’ve been following Clari and its CEO Andy Byrne for the past four years as they’ve doubled down on product and launched an enormously successful GTM strategy while the revenue operations movement heated up. As a leader, Andy brings more than two decades of experience in sales, marketing, and management to Clari — and this is far from his first rodeo. Prior to Clari he was part of the founding team at Clearwell Systems, where he helped grow the company from pre-product & pre-revenue to $100 million run rate until its acquisition by Symantec (SYMC).

The success of a startup never hinges on any one person, however, and Andy has gathered a highly experienced, high-performing team around him. Clari’s CTO Venkat Rangan has more than 36 years of experience (22 years of executive experience) designing and architecting enterprise software products. VP of Product Kurt Leafstrand also has more than two decades of experience, previously serving as Senior Director of Product Management at Clearwell and Director of Product Management at IBM. Clari’s CRO Kevin Knieriem formerly led sales teams at Oracle and SAP (where he spent a decade and ran many of SAP’s US retail lines).

Simply put, we’re inspired by the brainpower and maturity of this team, who we believe are more than well equipped to bring Clari to the next level.

Revenue operations  may be new, but Sapphire has been investing in  this space for years. Through our investments in LeanData, Highspot, and Outreach, we support and collaborate with founders working at the front lines of automating and improving the revenue operations  business process every day. We’ve been privileged to see this sector develop and come into focus for other VCs and high-growth teams — and are thrilled to bring our expertise and network to support Clari as it continues to lead the pack in the years to come.