Crowdsourced contact vendor Lusha closed on a $205 million Series B that valued the company at $1.5 billion. Growth equity firm PSG led both the Series A and B rounds. ION Crossover Partners also joined the B round, which brought total Lusha investment to $245 million.
Following its February Series A, Lusha invested in its go-to-market strategy and trebled its growth rate.
“We were still bootstrapped one year ago when we understood that we have a big opportunity to surge forward. We have since tripled our revenue growth rate, and that is why we required another funding round faster than we thought,” explained CEO Yoni Tserruya. “The next stage will be to go public. I’m not sure when that will be, but it will take at least two more years. We are seeing many companies that are going public too early and are facing difficulties in making projections and meeting expectations.”
The additional funds will be deployed towards building out its community of 800,000 B2B sales professionals “into the industry’s largest,” expanding its global presence, and continuing to focus on data quality, compliance, features, and ease of use.
“We have been following Lusha’s progress over the last two years and found the team’s vision and execution highly impressive. As sales teams continue to leverage data to drive their go-to-market strategies, Lusha is becoming an integral product for teams to optimize their outreach to improve overall win rates. With Lusha’s data significantly increasing the value and ROI realized by sales teams, we are excited to be a part of this next chapter in Lusha’s remarkable journey.”
Gili Iohan, General Partner at ION Crossover Partners
“Our primary goal is to give every salesperson, regardless of size or budget, access to the highest quality data at the most affordable price while championing world-class standards of privacy and compliance,” said President Assaf Eisenstein. “With this funding round, we will continue to invest highly in our data infrastructure and privacy standards to provide optimal levels of compliance and security for Lusha’s 800,000+ community members,” said Assaf Eisenstein, Co-founder and President of Lusha.
Contact data is gathered from a Community service that ingests email headers and signature blocks to maintain business card and email signature data. Data is also collected from publicly available sources, third-party licensing, and algorithmic data appending (e.g., email templates). Lusha claims that its community members help Lusha deliver “the most accurate data through constant validation and enrichment of its database.”
As part of its GDPR and CCPA compliance program, individuals are notified when they’ve been added to the database. Only business data is gathered, with no Personally Identifiable Information collected.
Lusha provides 100 million business profiles, 60 million email addresses, and 50 million direct dials across 15 million companies.
The Lusha browser extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge sends contacts from Gmail, social media, and B2B sites directly to Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho, SalesLoft, and Outreach. Users license credits individually or for a team, with the admin allocating credits. Lusha also supports Salesforce bulk enrichment and a contacts API.
Lusha helps sales professionals identify their ideal buyers and tailor their message to potential customers.
“Similar to the shift that marketing underwent a decade ago, sales professionals are abandoning spray and pray outreach, in favor of super-targeted selling based on data,” said Tserruya. “Lusha enables all salespeople to utilize data to recognize their most relevant opportunities and maximize revenue in a simple, easy-to-use solution. We look forward to using this funding to be at the forefront of this industry shift and grow Lusha into the largest B2B sales community”.
Lusha is rapidly growing, adding 29 staffers last month. It grew 45% over the past six months and 103% over the past year to 229 employees. Engineering grew 170% over the past year to 55 employees. Their other top departments are Sales (34 headcount, up 106%), Support (22 headcount, up 175%), and IT (21 headcount, up 91%).
The Israeli firm expects to end the year with 240 employees, twenty in its Boston office.
Lusha, founded in 2016, lists 32 open positions: five sales and support openings in Boston and twenty-seven openings in Tel Aviv across engineering, data, R&D, product, marketing, sales, HR, compliance, finance, and customer success.
Lusha’s customers include Facebook, Google, Dropbox, and Uber. Most of its customers are B2B SaaS companies, but it’s also used by VCs, investors, and recruiting agencies.