WalkMe raises $75M more for its AI-based on-screen guidance tech
More funding is rolling in for Israeli startups. Today, WalkMe, a startup that has built a cloud-based platform that businesses can use to make their web and mobile interfaces easier to navigate with on-screen guidance and prompts, has raised $75 million in funding that it plans to use to expand in markets like Japan, Germany and Latin America, as well as to make more acquisitions to build out the big data and machine learning that powers its insights and recommendations.
WalkMe’s president Rephael Sweary said the startup was not disclosing its valuation, but noted that it was “significantly” more than the $400 million valuation it had in last year’s round, and that is definitely more than $500 million. We are still trying to get a more concrete valuation and will update this post as we learn more.
As with the $50 million round WalkMe raised about a year ago, this round was led by Insight Venture Partners, with other undisclosed investors also participating. (Previous investors include Mangrove, Scale Venture Partners and Giza Venture Capital, among others.) It brings the total raised by WalkMe to nearly $168 million.
Notably, this was not a round they were looking to raise right now. “We weren’t planning to raise that much, but the opportunity presented itself,” he said in an interview. “The company is doing great and we thought we could use the capital to grow even faster.”
Sweary confirms that the company is not profitable right now but that this is by design. “We are profitable in terms of the unit economics,” he said. “A SaaS company that is profitable is one that is not growing.” No details on actual revenue figures or growth except to not that its seeing over “hundreds percent” growth year-over-year. It has thousands of customers including 25 percent of the Fortune 500, it says. Customers include OpenTable, Microsoft, Adobe and others. It’s priced on a freemium model but doesn’t publish specific costs openly.
The company has made a couple of interesting acquisitions to break into new areas beyond its basic and legacy web business: at the beginning of the year it acquired abbi.io to expand into A/B testing on mobile, and in April it acquired a visual analytics firm, Jaco, to help gain better insights into user behaviour. Both of these are helping WalkMe expand not just in terms of platforms but intelligence: the company is powering the recommendations it gives to users (and to businesses in terms of how they build their services both for customers and employees) through machine learning algorithms that are bringing in all these and other data points.
The plan going forward is to expand that data play even further. “WalkMe has developed only 30% of our product vision,” Sweary said. “We are moving towards more data and being more tech driven to provide a more sophisticated picture of how your products work. We use data to understand the possibilities of the software and what people use, and what they do not use.”
“WalkMe demonstrates tremendous value in helping employees and customers better adopt technology,” said Jeff Horing, Managing Director, Insight Venture Partners, said in a statement. “The WalkMe team has an acute awareness of the digitization challenges facing every enterprise, and we look forward to our continued partnership as they fuel their strength in this market.”
Published at Wed, 26 Jul 2017 13:52:18 +0000
