Pendo, a data-driven platform to help companies deliver great products, today announced it has raised $11 million in Series A financing led by Battery Ventures, with participation from Salesforce Ventures and existing seed investors Contour Venture Partners, Core Capital Partners and IDEAFund Partners. As part of the financing, Battery General Partner Neeraj Agrawal will join Pendo's board.
The Pendo platform delivers detailed and valuable insights into customers' product usage to help product management teams improve onboarding and product engagement, as well as to help retain customers over time.
According to research from SiriusDecisions, 87 percent of business-to-business product managers don't use product management-specific software. 'Historically, product managers have mainly tried to use applications designed for other purposes -- office productivity, product development or project management -- to gather, synthesize and analyze the insights needed to understand customer behavior,' said Jeff Lash, Service Director of the Product Management Advisory Service at SiriusDecisions.
Pendo provides product management teams with a powerful platform to better understand and improve product usage. Without requiring any engineering resources, product teams using Pendo can glean all of their customers' behavior in their products and dynamically insert interactive messages in their products to improve adoption. This unique combination of capabilities enables companies to create a personalized experience for all users.
'Engagement is a leading indicator of product health, including both the quality of a vendor's software solution and whether a company's customers will ultimately realize value from the solution,' said Todd Olson, CEO of Pendo. 'As software-as-a-service becomes the predominant software business model, in which 90% of customer value comes after the initial sale through recurring subscriptions, delivering outstanding products and understanding how customers are using those products is now, more than ever, critical to a company's bottom line.'
Pendo unlocks the value of product data for use throughout the enterprise. Insights from the Pendo platform can be used by sales teams to increase the effectiveness of prospective clients' product trials and trial conversions; allow support teams to engage more effectively with clients through in-application trainings; and enable customer success teams to influence customer renewals and identify up-sell opportunities.
The financing will enable the company to continue to accelerate its growth through additional sales and marketing activity, and increase client acquisition. Since January 2014, Pendo has experienced more than 30 percent user growth every month and is now tracking over one billion user actions per month. Current clients include Coupa, Dude Solutions, FICO, Infor, Invoca, JAMA Software and SciQuest, among others.
'Pendo frees companies from antiquated approaches to gathering insights into customers' product usage,' said Dave Coburn, EVP of Product, Invoca. 'Now, we can see exactly how customers are interacting with our product, understand which features are most important to them, and influence adoption of new features with in-application messaging and guides. This intelligence not only helps our product team, it helps our marketing team, our sales team, and our customer success team.'
'We are thrilled to join Pendo as long-term partners in the company's growth,' said Battery Ventures General Partner Neeraj Agrawal. 'Historically, enterprises haven't been able to gather necessary insights regarding product usage and engagement, resulting in lots of 'shelfware' -- meaning software that just sat on shelves after it was bought. But we are now in the software-as-a-service era, where companies must constantly prove their value to keep revenue coming in. Pendo's technology helps its clients harness the data and insights needed to deliver great products that continuously drive value for the customer.'
About Pendo:
Pendo was founded in 2013 by former product managers that have experienced the joys and challenges of creating great products at companies like Rally, Google, Cisco, and Red Hat, among others. With a powerful analytics and guidance platform designed to help companies understand and influence how users interact with their software applications, Pendo is on a mission to reinvent the way product teams build and increase engagement in their products. For more information, visit: www.pendo.io
About Battery Ventures:
Battery invests in potentially cutting-edge, category-defining businesses in markets including application software, IT infrastructure, consumer internet/mobile and industrial technologies. Founded in 1983, the firm backs companies at stages ranging from seed to private equity and invests globally from offices in Boston, Silicon Valley and Israel. Follow the firm on Twitter @BatteryVentures, visit our website at www.battery.com and find a full list of Battery's portfolio companies here.
About Salesforce Ventures:
Salesforce Ventures -- Salesforce's corporate investment group -- invests in the next generation of enterprise technology to help companies connect with their customers in entirely new ways. Portfolio companies receive funding as well as access to the world's largest cloud ecosystem and the guidance of Salesforce's innovators and executives. With Salesforce Ventures, portfolio companies can also leverage the expertise of the Salesforce Foundation to incorporate its 1-1-1 model of integrated philanthropy to make giving back part of their business model. Salesforce has invested in more than 150 enterprise cloud startups since 2009. For more information, please visit www.salesforce.com/ventures.