Revenue Intelligence vendor Clari closed on a $150 million Series E that valued the firm at $1.6 billion. The round more than triples its 2019 Series D valuation. The financing was led by Silver Lake with B Capital Group and existing investors Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, Madrona Ventures, Thomvest, and Tenaya Capital also participating. To date, Clari has raised $285 million.
Clari will deploy the funds to accelerate product development, expand ecosystem partnerships, and drive global expansion. It is planning on doubling its headcount to 600 by the end of this year. San Francisco-based Clari is “hiring across all departments.”
The firm’s ability to predict revenue was crucial over the past year as firms scrambled to understand their pipeline and opportunities during the pandemic. Platform usage doubled last year and executive time increased 50%. The firm also saw deal updates increase 80% last year while pipeline and forecast revenue doubled.
Seventy percent of Clari’s new customers inked multi-year deals, and 60% of existing customers increased their seat counts or invested in additional product capabilities last year.
The round comes at a time when Gartner is bullish on the RevOpps segment.
“By 2025, Gartner predicts 75 percent of high-growth tech companies will use RevOps for end-to-end revenue production enabling hyperautomated sales and omnichannel customer engagement. RevOps is a holistic organizational model that aligns the company around three elements of centralized ops and processes, a communal shared-data layer, and a continuous customer engagement capability, all measured around revenue production.”
Alastair Woolcock, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner.
“Today’s news is more than just the next phase in Clari’s evolution,” said CEO Andy Byrne. “It’s validation for the entire revenue operations movement. It’s a call to every company and every leader working to manage revenue generation as a predictable process, one that can be controlled, automated, and optimized, like any other business process.”
Byrne did not disclose 2020 revenue but noted that it beat the original plan by 110%.
“That’s why we’ve had such great investor interest…[VCs] were hearing in the investment community about how transformative Clari has been…Giving companies what we call revenue confidence, being able to go and understand where you’re going to be and to accurately predict the impact the pandemic is going to have on your trajectory, good or bad,” Byrne explained.
With strong revenue momentum and a healthy valuation, an IPO may be in Clari’s future.
“I would say the answer is unequivocally yes, and we’re building toward this,” said Byrne. “We don’t have a time frame upon which we know where we’re going to go public, but the next goal is to get to the IPO starting line.”
Part II, which discusses Clari’s recent enhancements, posts tomorrow.
