Cloud Finance Intelligence Startup Adaptive Insights Gets $75M, Reportedly At A Unicorn Valuation
TechCrunch: Adaptive Insights, a fast-growing startup that sells cloud-based services to finance and other management teams to model a company’s performance and other business intelligence, today is announcing that it has raised $75 million in funding — a Series G investment that brings the total raised by the company to $176 million.
“The market opportunity here is huge as the CFO has become a power player in the C-Suite,” Tom Bogan tells TechCrunch. Bogan came on as CEO earlier this year while retaining his other role as chairman of Citrix. “As a former CFO myself, I have seen this first hand and it is accelerating — look at Twitter’s Anthony Noto and Google’s Ruth Porat, and the fact that 25 percent of CEOs at Fortune 500 companies are former CFOs.”
The news comes on the back of Adaptive Insights — originally founded in 2003 — seeing a very strong period of recent growth, with (undisclosed) revenues rising 50 percent year-on-year on a customer base of 2,700, many of them huge companies in their own right (they include the likes of American Family Insurance, Coca-Cola, Boston Scientific, LinkedIn, Palantir, Zendesk and more).
The funding — which will be used to help the company continue to expand its business both in terms of products and international footprint — is notable for another reason. It looks like Adaptive Insights is joining the so-called “unicorn club” of startups valued at $1 billion or more.
Not that the company wants to talk about this. Bogan would not disclose the company’s valuation to TechCrunch except to note that it is a “significant increase from our previous funding round and we are very pleased.”
However, three months ago, the company’s founder and chairman Rob Hull gave a long, but largely unnoticed interview on the growth his company went through to take its place in the so-called “unicorn club”, noting that even in its last financing round in 2012, when it raised $45 million, it was “already getting close.”
On the other hand, VC Experts puts the valuation far lower than this, $453 million post-money, based on data in the startup’s amended certificate of incorporation.
For what it’s worth, Bogan says this round was oversubscribed and Adaptive Insights calls the mix of investors who did come in a “dream team.”
They include new investor JMI Equity, alongside previous backers Norwest Venture Partners, ONSET Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Cardinal Venture Capital, Monitor Ventures, and Information Venture Partners. JMI Equity is notable for its experience backing other cloud startups that have blown up, such as Eloqua and ServiceNow. “It’s the ideal mix of investors at the right time – for both the stage of the company and the market in which we’re competing,” Bogan says.
