On behalf of the entire cloud team at Bessemer Venture Partners, we are thrilled to be joining the team at Gainsight as investors!
Since the very first publication of Bessemer’s 10 Laws of Cloud Computing, one thing has been very clear and we say it repeatedly: “the single biggest driver of long term profitability for your cloud business (and thus valuation) is the renewal rate of your customers”. Simply put, customer success equals company success. This is why we’re especially excited to be leading the $25 million financing round of Gainsight.
Gainsight is the Customer Success market leader. They pioneered the segment, have the largest and strongest team in the space, and have an exciting product roadmap that allows subscription businesses to aggregate, analyze, and automate their customer interactions. Several of our portfolio companies are happy Gainsight customers, and we all benefit from their deep thought leadership and shared content.
As the cloud economy reaches adolescence, companies are broadening their focus from just landing new sales, to also increasing attention on their renewals and upsells. Gainsight is there to support this emerging need with a purpose built SaaS product for Customer Success Management and Account Management teams. Unlike the ugly days of licensed software “shelfware”, any cloud business growing up to 100% annually, by definition, still depends on their existing customers for a majority of their revenue. Isn’t it time that these teams had a powerful product to manage these relationships? We think so, and the data supports the importance of this emerging segment.
Over the last 16 years, we’ve evaluated thousands of cloud computing businesses at Bessemer Venture Partners. During this time we’ve been fortunate to assemble one of the largest (and what we believe to be the best!) cloud portfolio in the venture capital industry. This allows us to work with many of the early pioneers including seven of the early cloud IPOs (see the Bessemer Cloud Index), four of the emerging private cloud Unicorns, and dozens of the future leaders. We’ve worked hard to learn from these great teams and to better understand the key drivers for success in the cloud computing market. That’s why we’ll also be working with Gainsight and McKinsey & Company to extend our industry benchmarks to include the SuccessIndex, which will correlate financial and operational data from industry leaders. Stay tuned for more on the SuccessIndex shortly.
We look forward to working with Nick, Sreedhar, Dan, Anthony, and the entire Gainsight team and veteran Board, on this fun journey ahead.
