Usermind, builder of an orchestration hub for business operations (BizOps) teams, emerged from stealth today to announce a $14.5 million Series B funding round led by Menlo Ventures with participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and CRV, bringing the company's total financing to $22.1 million. Usermind will use the funds to expand sales and marketing, and to accelerate its R&D focused on the digital transformation of companies. Matt Murphy, managing director at Menlo Ventures, joins the Usermind Board of Directors, which includes Ben Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz co-founder and partner, and Usermind co-founders Michel Feaster, CEO, and Przemek Pardyak, CTO.

BizOps is an emerging business practice designed to drive front-office growth and revenue, much in the way that DevOps is transforming IT and engineering. BizOps has three core principles: 1) break down the walls between business operations teams such as marketing, sales and finance; 2) shift perspective from leads, opportunities and escalations to focus on customer, partner and product lifecycles; 3) combine analysis with action and experimentation to drive growth, decrease churn and sales costs, and increase the lifetime value of a customer. (Editor's note: see Usermind's BizOps vision announcement made today, which provides additional information on the BizOps movement.)

'The explosion of SaaS has solved problems across every business function. However, applications are siloed and data sources are increasingly disconnected. This has led to the rise of BizOps, but most companies can't afford the expense of building custom solutions,' said Matt Murphy, managing director at Menlo Ventures. 'Usermind has recognized this need and taken it head on. It has a massive opportunity in being the first to market with a commercial BizOps platform.'

'Companies are eager to shift to customer-aligned operations,' Feaster said. 'Their next steps are in unifying all their business data, taking actions across all their systems, and then measuring and optimizing to improve their processes.' Usermind centralizes business logic and data into a single orchestration hub, which enables operations teams to connect enterprise apps, map data to user-defined key entities, trigger real-time actions, measure impact and make process improvements -- all within the same platform.

'Standalone SaaS applications don't provide a complete customer journey. Without mapped and connected data across all our enterprise apps, we wouldn't have a connected view of our customer,' said Chris Farrell, CEO of expense reporting application provider Tallie. 'Usermind connects our systems and business logic so we can identify the patterns that help us treat every customer how they want to be treated. Now we can tell who will benefit from a more self-service experience, and who needs a high-touch process with a sales rep. With Usermind, we can experiment on when and how to reach out to our customers, get analytics on these interactions, and take immediate actions that improve conversion and retention.'

About Usermind
Usermind provides the first unified platform for orchestrating business operations (BizOps). With Usermind, companies can define and automate all aspects of their customer lifecycles to improve revenue, retention and profitability. Built for the nontechnical user, Usermind makes it simple to integrate enterprise applications, map data between them, automate end-to-end processes, measure the impact of processes on business outcomes, and take instant action to improve them. With a BizOps infrastructure in place, operations teams can manage what really matters, shifting from tactical management of leads, opportunities, and invoices to strategic management of customer, partner and product lifecycles. Founded in 2013, Usermind is based in Seattle and backed by Andreessen Horowitz, CRV and Menlo Ventures.