Congratulations to Outreach (#15) and Drift (#22) for making the LinkedIn Top 25 U.S. Startups list. To be eligible for Top Startups, companies must be 7 years old or younger, have at least 50 employees, be privately held, and headquartered in the U.S. Selection is based upon employment growth, engagement, job interest, and attraction of top talent between July 1, 2017 and June 30, 2018
Coincidentally, I just began covering Drift in my subscription newsletter. They will be covered here in two weeks following my standard embargo. I’ve been covering Outreach for several years.
Outreach is a sales engagement platform that helps sales reps manage their multi-channel communications with customers and prospects. Along with templates and cadence tools, Outreach offers call recording and coaching, analytics, a partner ecosystem, and meeting management. The firm has 285 employees and is looking to double its headcount over the next year following a $65 million funding round. LinkedIn noted that they have 2,400 customers.
Seattle-based Outreach said in April that it plans to double its headcount over the next year. (Chart Source: LinkedIn)
Conversational marketing firm Drift landed a $60 million Series C round earlier this year. The funds will be used to quadruple its office space with an expanded presence in Boston and new space in San Francisco. As one-third of their clients are outside of the United States, they plan to open international offices later this year.
The Drift platform removes webforms and offers chatbots for conversational discovery and qualification. “A sale doesn’t get made until a conversation happens. So, with Conversational Marketing, we created a new way of doing marketing and sales that removed the roadblocks and hurdles that can get in the way of someone talking to your business. This creates a better customer experience, makes it easier for people to buy, and ultimately creates a faster path to revenue,” said CEO David Cancel.
Drift supports email sequencing, revenue reporting, visitor id, chatbots, playbooks (templates), reporting, email reply management, and meeting scheduling. A new Conversational Advertising capability provides conversational landing pages instead of webforms.
Drift’s goal is to be the Amazon for Business. “Amazon revolutionized how people buy with the one-click buying experience, and that’s what we all expect online today,” said Cancel. “But when it comes to B2B, the buying process is painful. Companies force buyers to fill out forms and jump through so many hoops just to talk to them, despite the fact that most buying decisions have already been made by the time someone comes to your website. We’re on a mission to build the most customer-centric company in the world and make B2B buying as easy as buying from Amazon.”
Boston-based Drift has had rapid employee growth over the past two years. (Chart Source: LinkedIn)
Inc 5000 Rank, Revenue, and CAGR Data (2014-2018 Lists)
Several sales and marketing intelligence firms made the 2018 Inc. 5000 list including DiscoverOrg, Zoominfo, and FullContact. Signaling difficulties in the predictive analytics space, no firms from that category made the Inc. 5000 list.
Inc. magazine lists the top 5,000 US firms based upon three-year revenue growth rates. Eligible firms must have at least $100,000 in 2014 revenue and $2 million by 2017.
Zoominfo made the list for the fourth consecutive year, with revenue reaching $59.4 million and a three-year CAGR of 45%. Zoominfo grew its headcount by 50% between July 2017 and July 2018 and raised its customer base to 8,000 enterprise customers.
“The Inc. 5000 is the measuring stick for successful, high-growth, private companies,” said new Zoominfo CEO Derek Schoettle. “Since joining ZoomInfo earlier this summer, I’ve seen the tech innovation and the business demand for trustworthy customer data that makes me confident that ZoomInfo will continue to make this prestigious list for years to come.”
Zoominfo added over 100 staff and 2,000 customers in the past year. At their June Growth Acceleration Summit, VP of Corporate Development Phil Garlick attributed the firm’s success to hard work, teamwork, sweat, and tears.
SalesLoft made the list for the first time as the firm caught fire after launching their sales engagement platform a few years ago. Revenue grew at a 77% three-year CAGR to $13 million in 2017. SalesLoft also placed seventh on the most recent North American Deloitte Fast 500. The Atlanta-based firm recently acquired NoteNinja to integrate its meeting intelligence software into the broader set of SalesLoft sales engagement capabilities.
CEO Kyle Porter is “excited” to “empower” his customers in delivering “a better sales experience. Buyers around the world are recognizing the differentiated benefits of purchasing products and solutions from sellers who use SalesLoft.”
Other first-timers were identity resolution vendor FullContact (76% three-year CAGR to $14.0 million) and data hygiene and enrichment vendor Stirista (23% three-year CAGR to 5.0 million).
“Marketers, product professionals, and data analysts have had a lot of success using FullContact to enrich the data that exists in their CRM, marketing automation, and other databases,” said Scott Axcell, VP of Marketing at FullContact. “From audience insights to customer care, there is no shortage of use cases for accurate, enriched customer data.”
FullContact acquired Mattermark and its company and event database last December to complement the FullContact people dataset.
While Madison Logic once again made the list, their growth stalled with revenue declining $200,000 last year to $54.2 million. Their three-year CAGR was 27%.
“We achieved this honor through the strength of our team and success of our customers. Our platform, ActivateABM, helps the most innovative global companies accelerate growth by converting top prospects into customers. By integrating directly into the martech stack, we can deliver solutions that are simple, strategic and entirely ROI-focused,” said Tom O’Regan, Madison Logic’s CEO. “We are thrilled to be recognized for the sixth time and proud of the momentum we’ve achieved on our mission to make the B2B marketer the driving force for growth and change in the enterprise.”
CreditSafe USA made the list for the second time, growing revenue to $13.3 million last year with a three-year CAGR of 52%. However, most of the growth was in the first two years with 2017 revenue only growing $500,000. The firm has over 100,000 subscription customers, 10,000 in the United States.
“Our team is extremely humbled to be included in such an elite group of high-growth companies,” said Matthew Debbage, CEO of Creditsafe USA and Asia. “When we established here six years ago, there was one large entrenched player in the business credit space in the US, so we felt our success was far from a sure thing. This recognition really helps put our hard work into perspective.”
“Being the younger, more nimble and tech-friendly player in the space has given many advantages as we strive to provide exceptional value to our customers,” continued Debbage. “We know that if are going to disrupt the industry, then we’d need to out-hustle our competition each and every day and really want to thank all those customers who’ve taken a chance on us.”
CreditSafe primarily provides credit data in the US, although they did enter the US and UK sales intelligence market a few years ago with Sales Joe. CreditSafe financials and filings are at the core of several European product lines including DueDil.
CreditSafe maintains offices in eight European countries, Japan, and the United States. The company serves the credit, collections, sales, marketing, and compliance functions.
Private company profiler Pitchbook is no longer eligible for the list as they were acquired by Morningstar, but the firm disclosed a 60% CAGR since 2009. They have grown their user base from 11,000 to 18,000 since the end of 2017. Since the beginning of the year, Pitchbook has grown from “just over” 600 employees to 908.
Finally, Pure Incubation made the list for the fifth year in a row posting a 43% three-year CAGR on $20 million in revenue. The Massachusetts demand generation firm offers data and marketing services for the medical and technology sectors. Products include PureB2B (Content Syndication and Intent Marketing), PureMed (Healthcare Providers and Facilities Database), ProspectOne (B2B Intelligence and Data Services), and Demand Science (Philippines-based Back Office Marketing, HR, Seles Development and Engineering Services).
Pure Incubation’s consistent growth “is another testament that we are building a strategically relevant and innovative company in the demand generation space,” said Chairman Barry Harrigan. “Pure Incubation’s continued placement on the list is not something we take for granted and we are going to keep pushing to appear again in 2019.”
DiscoverOrg made the list for the eighth-straight time. I covered their achievement yesterday.
DiscoverOrg continued its blistering growth. It acquired RainKing at the end of August 2017 so only four months ($13 million est.) of RainKing revenue was included in DiscoverOrg’s 2017 revenue. Another $26 million (est.) will show up in DiscoverOrg’s 2018 revenue. The CAGR and revenue data was sourced from the 2014 through 2018 Inc. 5000 lists.
DiscoverOrg made the Inc 5000 list for the eighth straight year with three-year revenue growth of 184%. The revenue was boosted by the acquisition of RainKing last August, but the firm would have made the list even without the acquisition. Over the past six years, DiscoverOrg posted a compound average growth rate (CAGR) of 60%, growing revenue from $5.5 million in 2011 to $91.9 million in 2017.
“For 10 years, our singular focus has been on how to fuel our customers’ pipeline and revenue growth with the best B2B data available anywhere,” said Henry Schuck, DiscoverOrg CEO. “Being named to the Inc. 5000 list for the eighth consecutive year–and especially at the size and scale we are now–demonstrates our continued unwillingness to settle for anything less than excellence.”
Last year, DiscoverOrg more than doubled its database and increased its headcount by 50%. DiscoverOrg’s Annualized Recurring Revenue (ARR) was over $130 million at the end of the year, indicating the firm was in a strong position to make the list again in 2019. DiscoverOrg only recognized around $13 million in 2017 RainKing revenue over the final four months, so approximately $26 million in additional subscription revenue will hit their books in 2018.
2017 organic revenue growth was around $19 million.
“Out of the nearly seven million private companies moving the economy forward every day, only a tiny fraction have demonstrated such remarkably consistent high growth. DiscoverOrg’s eighth Inc. 5000 honor truly puts the organization in rarefied company.”
James Ledbetter, Inc. Editor-in-chief
What is even more impressive is that DiscoverOrg passed InsideView and Avention (now D&B Hoovers) in revenue with a service that focused on the technology space while the broader sales and marketing intelligence services target the technology space, business services, professional services, and financial services.
A broad set of CRM, MAP, Sales Engagement, and Browser connectors.
“Great data is magic,” tweeted the firm.
Or course, DiscoverOrg wasn’t the only B2B Sales Intelligence, Sales Engagement, or DaaS company to make the list. I will cover Zoominfo, SalesLoft, and these other firms tomorrow.
Congratulations to Outreach (#15) and Drift (#22) for making the LinkedIn Top 25 U.S. Startups list. To be eligible for Top Startups, companies must be 7 years old or younger, have at least 50 employees, be privately held, and headquartered in the U.S. Selection is based upon employment growth, engagement, job interest, and attraction of top talent between July 1, 2017 and June 30, 2018
