Sales Engagement Leader Outreach Reaches Unicorn Status, Raises $114 Million Series E
Seattle-based SaaS Company Uses Machine Learning to Help More Than 3,000 Companies Generate Sales Leads, Close Deals and Retain Customers
Outreach, the leading sales engagement platform, has secured $114 million in Series E financing at a $1.1 billion valuation, making it the first and only unicorn in the rapidly growing sales engagement category. Sales engagement uses machine learning to provide actionable insights to sales reps and streamline communication between sales teams and prospects. The result is an increase in pipeline, sales cycle velocity and close rate.
Lone Pine Capital, an American-based private investment manager of both fundamental equity hedge and long-only funds, led Outreach’s Series E round with strong participation from Meritech Capital Partners and additional investment from new investor Lemonade Capital, Allison Bhusri’s investment fund. Existing investors DFJ Growth, Four Rivers Group, Mayfield, M12, Sapphire Ventures, Spark Capital and Trinity Ventures also joined the round, bringing Outreach’s total funding to date to $239 million.
“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 Manny Medina, CEO, Outreach. “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.”
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Outreach’s new financing will support the company’s growth as it delivers a complete system of action through a single pane of glass for all customer-facing reps. By infusing each aspect of the customer journey with the most advanced machine learning techniques, Outreach is able to help entire organizations make better and faster decisions about their customers and take immediate actions that directly impact sales and the customer experience. This funding will enable Outreach to continue on this path, finding new and innovative ways to support, measure and optimize customer-facing workflows and ultimately deliver more value for each rep.
“Outreach is truly unique in that its software has become an integral part of the workday for thousands of professionals across the entire customer journey. It sits in a category of untapped market potential with an opportunity for high growth,” said Lone Pine Capital.
Expansion is also a top priority for Outreach in the coming months as the company plans to double its machine learning team, expand its international footprint and further grow its partner ecosystem. Outreach recently announced an integration with Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 for Sales, enabling joint customers to leverage Outreach’s platform while syncing with Dynamics 365.
“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,” said George Bischof, Managing Director, Meritech Capital Partners.
Outreach, which was accurately predicted by Forbes as one of its “Next Billion Dollar Startups”, closed 2018 up 100+ percent and now has 315 employees, with 450 anticipated by the end of the year. The company supports more than 3,300 customer accounts and 50,000 sales professionals worldwide. Outreach was recently named one of Seattle Business Magazine’s Best Places to Work and one of the 50 Highest Rated Private Cloud Computing Companies to Work For by Battery Ventures.
