Outreach Inc., a Microsoft backed software manufacturer, has recently been reported to cross the billion-dollar threshold, becoming a member of the unicorn startups club.
The firm, that helps in automating essential but routine work for salespeople, raised nearly $114 million in a funding round and is now worth $1.1 billion. The funding round was led by Seattle-based Lone Pine Capital. Others who invested in the round include Lemonade Capital, Meritech Capital Partners, Microsoft Ventures, Mayfield, DFJ Growth, Sapphire Ventures, Trinity Ventures and Spark Capital.
Commenting on the funding round Outreach reportedly said that it has made the company the first unicorn in the sales-engagement market. Outreach develops a software that automates sales process communication which necessarily involves understanding interest levels of prospective customers and changing the minds of those who might not be adequately interested.
Manny Medina, chief executive officer, Outreach, has been reported to say that sales management is one of the most popular categories at present as sales teams are increasingly deploying software for their actions. According to Medina the company aims to reach an annual sales rate of $100 million by 2020. He added that Outreach plans to use the recent investment to ensure that the software integrates with all communication channels, expands internationally initially across English-speaking countries and bolstering engineering efforts.
According to sources, as cloud-computing companies are pushing to sell their software to corporations, Outreach is working to help existing customers which include DocuSign, Zendesk, Adobe Inc and Okta Inc to make their sales teams more productive.
George Bischof, a managing director, Meritech was quoted saying that the company has invested in Outreach due to its strong engagement at the user level which Meritech considers to be a part of mission-critical applications.
Medina said that Outreach currently connects to software and manages customer relationships of its clients like Salesforce.com Inc and Microsoft Corp. By the end of the year Outreach expects to integrate with SAP SE as well.