REDWOOD CITY, CA – November 12, 2015 – Gainsight™, the Customer Success company, announced today that it has closed a $50 million Series D round led by private equity and venture capital firm Insight Venture Partners. Insight has raised more than $13B and invested in more than 250+ growth-stage software, internet and data-services companies. Insight joins a superstar roster of investors including Battery Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Salesforce Ventures, Summit Partners, and Lightspeed Venture Partners, all who believe in Customer Success Management as the next great category of enterprise software.
The B2B world is going through massive disruption, as we are seeing with companies like Uber and Airbnb in B2C. With business models like software-as-a-service, cloud computing, pay-for-performance advertising and on-demand services, customers have more choice than ever and only pay when they get value. But as the cautionary tale of the music industry shows, just because customers benefit doesn’t necessarily mean that businesses flourish. According to leading technology research organization TSIA, the 50 largest technology companies have seen product revenue shrink 33% in the last 4 years. By contrast, new B2B upstart SaaS and cloud technology companies are growing rapidly but with much lower profit margins than their predecessors.
The only path to success for B2B is to drive profitable growth in existing customers through improved customer retention and expansion. According to the investment bank Pacific Crest’s 2015 survey, it is 6x-8x cheaper to retain or up-sell an existing client than it is to get a new one. And companies that invest in dedicated Customer Success teams, according to a 2015 survey by SaaS Capital, generate substantially higher retention and expansion than those that do not. Large B2B leaders and innovative upstarts are driving profitable growth from their customer base through Customer Success powered by Gainsight.
“We are incredibly fortunate to welcome Insight Venture Partners to the Customer Success movement; whose investment in Gainsight is a message to the industry that modern business success is fundamentally intertwined with Customer Success,” said Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight. “The Insight team has a unique depth of experience in scaling technology businesses and will add invaluable guidance as we build an industry-defining product and community in Gainsight.”
“The emergence of the Customer Success job function is a direct response to the pressure recurring revenue businesses face to retain and expand customers. Without a dedicated Customer Success strategy, companies will never be profitable,” said Jeff Lieberman, Managing Director at Insight Venture Partners. “We recognized that Gainsight is truly at the heart of this transformation and has partnered with some of the largest business in the world to invoke this change. We are excited to be on this journey with Nick and the Gainsight team.”
Customer Success Innovators Fuel Gainsight’s 252% YoY Growth
As part of today’s news, Gainsight also announced record Q3 sales momentum of 252% YoY growth with the addition of several new Customer Success pioneers to their growing client list. These industry-leading companies are adding their voice to the future of the Customer Success industry, and join Gainsight’s strong customer momentum now spanning:
- 9 of the top 25 software companies in the world (source)
- 15 of the top 43 publicly-traded SaaS companies (source)
- 9 of the 28 “unicorn” cloud companies (source)
More and more businesses are building Customer Success into the fabric of their operations and are choosing to partner with Gainsight to achieve their business outcomes. The new customers announced today support Gainsight’s continuing mission to lead Customer Success across both industries and geographies:
Geographies:
- Belgium (Showpad)
- Israel (Cloudyn)
- Switzerland (Jahia)
Industries:
- Advertising Technology (AppNexus)
- Open Source (Cloudera)
- Real Estate Solutions (BoomTown)
- Developer Platforms (Twilio)
- Software-as-a-Service (Arena Solutions, Cloudyn, Jahia, Showpad, Skytap)
AppNexus is the world’s leading independent ad tech platform, powering marketplaces for Internet advertising. “We have a vision for building a comprehensive 360 degree view of our customers in Salesforce.com, thus further enabling the productivity of our commercial teams”, said Pablo Dominguez, Vice President, Global Business Operations at AppNexus. “We are extremely excited to partner with Gainsight in helping us achieve our vision by providing a strategic solution that delivers on the needs of our business stakeholders in a highly configurable and engaging front end.”
“BoomTown is an established and growing SaaS software company that offers a comprehensive sales and relationship management solution for real estate professionals. One of our company values is to ‘create amazing experiences’, which starts by putting the customer at the forefront of everything we do as a business,” said Julie Karsten, Vice President of Client Success at BoomTown. “Gainsight will help us execute on that brand promise by giving our Client Success team easy access to customer health data and the workflow they need to ensure each customer is realizing meaningful value from the BoomTown platform.”
“Showpad’s leading sales enablement platform delivers contextual content to sales teams or channel partners on any device so they can sell anytime and anywhere. As a global Customer Success organization, we needed a system to centralize all of our customer health data, but beyond that, to mobilize our team to take action on that data in order to deliver greater customer value with our solution,” said Antoine Valentone, VP Customer Success at Showpad. “We chose Gainsight as our partner-of-choice for this initiative because of both the strengths of their platform and their industry expertise in Customer Success.”
Skytap provides Environments-as-a-Service (EaaS) to transform the software development lifecycle and help customers deliver better software, faster. “Our customers use Skytap to manage, share, deploy and decommission on-demand environments that contain everything needed to collaborate at each phase of the SDLC, without unnecessary costs and project delays due to manual configuration and dependencies,” said David Frost, Vice President of Customer Success at Skytap. “We selected Gainsight to provide us with a long term industry leading capability to build upon and enhance our established level of excellence for Customer Success.”
New Addition to Gainsight Executive Team
Gainsight today also announced the addition of Andy Knosp to the executive team as Vice President of Professional Services. Andy brings to Gainsight over 20 years of experience in IT, enterprise software, and professional services. Most recently, Andy was Vice President of Professional Services at Hortonworks. Prior to his tenure at Hortonworks, Andy has held leadership positions with VMware, Loudcloud, and Procter & Gamble.
For More Information:
- Learn more about Customer Success: https://www.gainsight.com/customer-success-management/
- Hear from Gainsight’s customers: https://www.gainsight.com/customers/
- Join Gainsight’s growing team: https://www.gainsight.com/careers/
About Gainsight
Gainsight™, the Customer Success company, helps businesses grow faster by reducing churn, increasing upsell, and driving customer advocacy. Gainsight’s product helps you touch customers effectively, track customer health consistently and transform the way your company orients around the customer. Gainsight provides a 360° view of customers and drives retention across Customer Success, sales, marketing, executive and product management. Learn how leading companies like Adobe, Box, DocuSign, HP, Marketo, Nutanix and Workday use Gainsight to help their customers succeed at www.gainsight.com.
Connect with Gainsight:
Blog: www.gainsight.com/blog
Twitter: www.twitter.com/GainsightHQ
Facebook: www.facebook.com/Gainsight
Media Contact
Gainsight
Samantha Wheatley
615-497-1153
