Series C Financing Round Led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA – October 9, 2014 –
Gainsight, the Customer Success company, announced today that it has closed a $25 million Series C round in order to continue explosive growth and dominance as the trusted partner for driving Customer Success in B2B companies. Gainsight will use the funds to expand the R&D and execute on its vision for orchestrating new customer lifecycle in recurring revenue businesses. The latest round is a co-investment led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners. Bessemer’s prolific cloud partner Byron Deeter will join Gainsight’s Board of Directors and Lightspeed’s Nakul Mandan will join as Board Observer.
“The last several quarters have shown that Customer Success has gone from an early adopter trend to being a must-have in B2B businesses,” said Nick Mehta, CEO at Gainsight. “With Bessemer and Lightspeed joining our movement, we now have the validation of the most successful cloud investment teams in the world to establish Gainsight as the definitive technology leader for the Customer Success industry.”
Partnership to Deliver SuccessBenchmark Reports:
Gainsight is also partnering with Bessemer and McKinsey & Co’s SaaSRadar on a quarterly success benchmark report for SaaS businesses called SuccessIndex. The research will correlate financial data from public and private SaaS companies (as indexed by both Bessemer and SaaSRadar) with transactional, performance, and operational data collected from participating Gainsight customers.
Recent headlines criticizing startup valuation relative to burn rate have brought the SaaS business model under fire. SuccessIndex research will be a vocal response against cynics who challenge the viability of the business model at scale by pointing to financial data like revenue retention, upsell and cross-sell, and other success metrics. The operating thesis of the project is that the subscription business model is made sustainable over the long term through a strategic focus on Customer Success.
“As business models undergo a subscription shift, markets struggle to understand which new fundamentals drive the outcomes of growth, retention, and future cash flows,” said Brian Stafford, Partner at McKinsey and leader of McKinsey’s SaaS Practice. “We’re excited to team up with Gainsight and Bessemer to reveal the customer success underpinnings of SaaS benchmarks.”
Quotes from Gainsight Investors:
“Having evaluated thousands of SaaS businesses, we’ve developed a set of cloud laws and metrics that are prioritized in terms of how great companies build value, and fundamentally customer success metrics such as customer retention and net up-sells are critical value drivers for all subscription businesses,” said Byron Deeter, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, a leading cloud venture firm with investments in companies such as Box, Cornerstone OnDemand, DocuSign, Twilio, and LinkedIn. “We are thrilled to partner with Gainsight as the clear leaders in the burgeoning Customer Success application category and to support their growth as they address this challenge at scale.”
“Gainsight’s vision to transform the way companies engage with their customers and delight them is truly exceptional,” said Nakul Mandan, Principal Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. “Although we’re at the forefront of this transformation, it’s clear that Gainsight has leapfrogged the competition by bringing together an A+ leadership team and building an industry-leading technology platform. We’re thrilled to back Nick and his team, and be part of this journey with them.”
The subject of a separate announcement today, the company unveiled Gainsight 2.0, the next generation of Customer Success technology that goes beyond data and analytics to provide Customer Success and Account Management teams with predictive workflow to orchestrate success across the customer lifecycle.
For More Information:
- Learn about the Gainsight 2.0 product announcement: https://www.gainsight.com/demo
- Meet with Gainsight at Pulse 2018 on April 10-11: https://www.gainsight.com/careers.
About Gainsight
Gainsight, the first and only complete Customer Success solution, helps businesses grow faster by reducing churn, increasing upsell, and driving customer advocacy. The company’s SaaS solution is 100% Salesforce native and uses predictive analytics to drive revenue from sales, usage, support, survey and other sources of external customer data. In this way, Gainsight provides a 360° view of customers and drives retention across Customer Success, sales, marketing, executive and product management. Learn how leading companies like Angie’s List, Castlight Health, Marketo and Informatica use Gainsight to help their customers succeed at www.gainsight.com.
