After laying off staff when the pandemic first hit, a Boston-based software firm is now planning on using its largest round of funding to date to hire new employees across Massachusetts and Europe.
Salsify Inc., a maker of sales software based in Boston’s Financial District, closed $155 million in new funding earlier this month. New investor Warburg Pincus LLC led the Series E round, which was announced on Wednesday.
Chief executive Jason Purcell, who co-founded Salsify with Jeremy Redburn and Rob Gonzalez, didn't give any specifics on the company's current valuation other than saying it has increased since the $43 million round raised in 2018. Since launching in 2012, Salsify has raised a total of $198.1 million.
"We wanted to make sure that we were in a position to continue to invest very aggressively in our customer success and our product and engineering efforts," Purcell said.
The company, which has approximately 350 people in Massachusetts out of a total workforce of 400, helps other companies such as L'Oréal Group and The Coca-Cola Company (NYSE: KO) drive sales across brick and mortar stores, online retailers and social media, among other channels by organizing and modifying product information on a company's website depending on the channel, and resize and optimize product images.
In April, the company was among several tech startups that downsized its staff as the coronavirus pandemic slowed economic activity. The company laid off 60 employees, or about 13% of its staff, the Business Journal's sister publication BostInno reported.
The latest investment will be used to expand teams in customer success, sales and marketing, and engineering. Over the next couple of quarters, Purcell said he expects to hire around 100 people across Europe and Massachusetts. Salsify opened its first European office in Lisbon, Portugal about two years ago.
"I would originally have said that the majority by far would have been in Massachusetts, and I still think many will. But one thing that Covid has done is it's allowed us to be more flexible in where we hire, because we've adapted really well to everybody working distributed. So while I still expect probably most of (the new hires) to be in Massachusetts, I think it'll be more distributed than it would have been before," Purcell said.
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