A $150 million Series E investment can buy a lot of growth, especially when it comes to building out our technical platform.
Personally, I’ve been in the founding team of four companies, including Clari, and the Series E funding we announced on March 3 marks the pinnacle of my career. I have a deep sense of gratitude to all of the employees, investors, and customers that got us here. I’m humbled to see how far we've come.
But when people ask me about the impact and power of that investment, I tell them: While this is a huge validation of our thesis that the revenue operations movement is here, there is a ton of work to be done ahead of us, and it feels like we are just at the starting point.
It has taken an immense effort by the entire team, building and growing Clari, and realizing the vision and necessity of a revenue operations platform that supports every business.
But funding rounds aren’t a stand-alone goal. They’re a milestone on a larger roadmap. What does that funding mean for how we’re continuing to build Clari?
The Big Picture
Clari helps revenue teams perform better, with more predictability and effectiveness—and we're continuing to make major investments in the platform to give everyone from the boardroom to the front line visibility into what needs to happen next. What's the impact?
At Clari, we've already seen how our platform impacts our customers' ability to not just call the number, but make the number. And if this means they're able to close an extra 1% in revenue, then that means major impact across entire economies
If you look at the whole economy, the U.S. is currently running around $21 trillion GDP, according to the World Bank. Of that, B2B ecommerce sales is estimated to reach $6 trillion by the end of 2020, according to the global research firm Frost & Sullivan.
If Clari can improve efficiency by 1%, that would represent $60 billion. Now imagine if we were able to make a 10% impact—that would represent $600 billion added to the U.S. economy. I surely would like to have a hand in that process, and I see Clari as the right vehicle for that push.
Clari has invested heavily in our Data Hub, which securely collects and manages data from a variety of key sources of revenue signals such CRM systems, messaging systems and operational data. In every machine learning and artificial intelligence application, the data is key—that’s what forms the basis of all insights.
Clari has invested in building a robust data pipeline and architecture to capture every signal that’s important from a revenue perspective. More importantly, the Data Hub maintains historical snapshots of every relevant change, which then feeds into our analytics and insights. That data architecture is a vital differentiator for us as a company. Coupled with the new funding, that data will allow us to accelerate building out those machine learning and AI capabilities, which in turn will offer more, and deeper, insights into the revenue operations process.
For example, we might apply machine learning and AI to help with revenue insights for optimizing marketing investment, optimizing growth investments, and determine strategic growth initiatives.
The investment is a seal of approval that we’re moving in the right direction. It’s a validation of the value of the revenue operations moving and the value that we bring to our customers. It’s a demonstration of the necessity of a solution that brings all the data together, and helps managers and leaders better understand their businesses, and where their sales forecast is moving.
Aligned in India
Last year, I had the opportunity to visit Clari’s India office in person, pre-pandemic. I was astounded by the talent and organization our leaders there had built. Those talents continue to grow. A few days after our Series E announcement, our director there, Sanjay Kumar Mahalingam, was called out by Forbes as an under-30 tech leader to watch. In 2018 he set up our research and development hub there, and that investment is only increasing.
We’ve always envisioned that India office as a key development center, and we’re doubling-down on investments to support our efforts in India in order to continue innovating in several areas of the product. For example, components of our Data Hub technology is driven by our overseas office, as well as our activity analytics, signal processing, and data ingestion.
Future, Forward
One thing we’ve always done at Clari, and will continue to do, is examine every aspect of the revenue operations process to see where Clari can best evolve to support the needs of such teams. We listen closely to our customers, their process pain points, and their needs, as we map out the future of the Clari platform.
We also encourage and support our teams to spot opportunities and then build solutions themselves. You can see that drive in the patent awards we announced, most of which began not with an executive mandate, but from a more grassroots effort within our engineering teams.
We’re not just building tools or a platform. One of our key company values is “one with customers,” and as we grow, we keep that foremost in our thoughts. This new funding level will provide us with even more opportunities to continue serving our customers and help them grow their revenue. While we can't share many details yet, we have many more exciting product and technology initiatives coming, and the next two to four years will see many of these initiatives deliver remarkable value to our customers.
Read more:
Why Revenue Operations? Why Now?