Seattle-based Outreach achieved unicorn status last April after raising a $114 million funding round. Over a year later, the company is still moving forward and raising new capital to grow.
On Wednesday, Outreach announced that it closed a $50 million funding round led by Sands Capital. This brings the company’s total funding raised to $289 million and pushes it to a valuation of $1.33 billion.
So what makes Outreach so valuable? The company has created a sales engagement platform that automates certain tasks and provides sales teams with valuable analysis. For example, it can track down the phone number of a potential customer, reschedule meetings when an “out-of-office” response is detected, it can collect data from emails and calls, and it can measure which tactics are working. The goal of the platform is to provide sales professionals with more resources that make them more effective at closing deals.
Over 4,000 companies use Outreach, including Adobe, DoorDash, Splunk and SAP. The company adds that it’s the only unicorn in the “sales enablement” space.
The company has grown rapidly over the past year. It moved to a new headquarters in Seattle, and doubled its employee headcount to almost 600 people. This new funding will help the company as it continues to grow to meet demand. It is specifically looking to invest in new markets, and grow its presence in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Outreach will also use the funding to launch new products like the recently announced Outreach Kaia, its integrated AI assistant. It’s currently hiring for a range of roles in sales, engineering, project management and more.
“The pandemic has changed sales forever and brought to the forefront the importance of having a sales engagement platform. Products like Outreach that provide high visibility and versatility — are now required for all sellers in order to be successful,” Manny Medina, the CEO and co-founder of Outreach, said in a statement. “As the sales engagement category leader, customers expect Outreach to drive transformative changes in sales. With this round of funding, we’re excited to accelerate our investments to meet the increasing demand we are seeing in the market while continuing to innovate.”
In addition to the funding, Outreach also announced it has hired Melissa Fisher to serve as the company’s new CFO. Fisher comes to Outreach from cloud-based IT solutions company Qualys, where she also served as CFO. At Qualys, she led the company’s financial teams as they doubled the employee headcount to over 1,300 people and saw their stock price increase more than 400 percent, according to the company.
