The customer is always right.
It's no new concept, but it's the idea behind Reston's Clarabridge, the company using sentiment and text analytics to blaze trails in what it calls Customer Experience Management solutions. It's a simple belief: anytime a customer has an opinion about a company – good or bad – it's a learning lesson for that business. And apparently, as evidenced by its closing on a massive round of funding today, they aren't the only ones dedicated to that idea. Backed by General Catalyst Partners, Summit Partners and Unica founder Yuchun Lee, Clarabridge raised $80 million in equity investment to use as a launchpad for expanding global operations, continuing product innovation, growing its roster of employees and increasing reach to account for the growing need of customer loyalty solutions.
While the tremendous investment is a great opportunity for growth, it also means Clarabridge will tack on some new faces to its board of directors. As terms of the investments, Yuchun Lee will take the position as chairman of the board and Larry Bohn of General Catalyst Partners and Tom Jennings of Summit Partners will become board members. However, Sid Banerjee will remain Clarabridge's CEO, a position he's held for the last eight years since founding the company.
Clarabridge, yielding an arsenal of clients like Wendy's International, Expedia, United Airlines and PetSmart, seems poised to take over an even larger share of the customer-loyalty and -experience analytics field. After all, in the last three years, the company showed a growth of 150 percent in revenue and 250 percent in recurring revenues, more than doubled its employee base and added offices in San Francisco and London.
With plans for even more expansion, it seems likely that an IPO may be in Clarabridge's near future. In fact, Banerjee told the Washington Business Journal's Bill Flook today that this most recent round of funding will "get the company on a very solid path to options like an IPO" and that he'd like to see his company take a similar route as fellow Northern Virginia company Cvent, who took on $117.6 million in its August IPOafter a huge funding round of $136 million two years prior. And when that moment does come, it will be huge not only for the D.C.-metro area tech community, but for the data-analytics software industry as well.
