Saturday, February 27, 2016

Qubit Raises $40m In Series C Round Led By Goldman Sachs As Businesses Look To Power ‘Data-First’ Customer Experience

LONDON - Friday, February 26th 2016 [ME NewsWire]



· Previous investors Accel and Salesforce Ventures and new investor Sapphire Ventures all participate; Goldman Sachs to join Accel and Balderton Capital on Qubit’s Board of Directors

· Investors back Qubit’s belief that data-led customer experience requires the advanced infrastructure that makes company unique as a Digital Experience Management Platform

· Qubit achieves 100% ARR growth rate and eyes cash flow break-even within 18 months through focused, sustainable and capital efficient business model



(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Qubit, the pioneer in delivering data-first customer experiences, today announces a $40m Series C investment led by Goldman Sachs Merchant Banking Division, with participation from Sapphire Ventures, and previous investors Accel and Salesforce Ventures.

The funding will enable Qubit to more than double its engineering capability and help the leading digital experience management company to continue its growth trajectory. With this funding round, the company has received a total of $76m funding to date.

Qubit powers the most ambitious ecommerce businesses in the world to transform their customer experiences into greater incremental revenues and deeper, more loyal customer relationships. It plans to explore new applications of its Visitor Cloud, its customer data platform, in new use cases as well as continue to expand into new industries.

Gartner recently identified customer experience management (CEM) as the number one technology investment priority for CEOs to improve their business in the next five years1. Qubit believes its market-leading platform is helping enterprises deliver on this.

The investment round sees a new addition to Qubit’s Board of Directors. David Reis, Managing Director and Head of Technology at Goldman Sachs Merchant Banking Division in Europe, will join Accel’s Bruce Golden and earlier investor Balderton Capital General Partner Bernard Liautaud on the board.

The firm added five new web solutions to its platform in 2015, increasing its Digital Experience Management portfolio and helping increase its average account size by more than 40%. In 2016 Qubit is set to evolve its capability into omnichannel customer experience management with the ability to stitch together the customer journey across every touchpoint; from website, apps, email, call center, advertising and more.

Qubit’s Visitor Cloud collects detailed information about consumer interactions with the web and mobile internet and identifies patterns of behavior in real time that drive revenue and create business-wide optimization opportunities.

Qubit’s unique technology stack, built on the Visitor Cloud customer data platform, processes more than 2.5 billion online customer interactions every day, enabling its clients to understand their visitors’ behavior and build profitable relationships with them.

David Reis said: “We’re delighted to be a part of the Qubit story and we share its belief that the next era of commerce requires a flexible platform capable of delivering differentiated customer experience.

“Qubit saw early how powerful a lever customer experience is going to be for businesses and built an infrastructure that starts with the data and allows its clients to engage with their customers based on a richer and deeper understanding of their behaviors and needs.”

Graham Cooke, Qubit’s CEO and co-founder, said: “We’re delighted to welcome Goldman Sachs into the Qubit family and David Reis onto our board of directors. We’re also excited to have the support of Sapphire Ventures, whose significant experience scaling companies internationally and extensive connections within the enterprise ecosystem will be valuable assets to our growth.

“Our investors see that Qubit continues to benefit from a long-term commitment to a sustainable business model in a rapidly growing market.

“The industry has been dogged by ineffective front-end point solutions. Now the market is quickly realizing that customer experience delivery is not a ‘front-end play’ but rather requires a large, integrated enterprise scale resource and a deep understanding of the customer. This is an area that Qubit invested in very early on. Our platform allows deeper customer understanding, better insights and faster action meaning our clients can give their customers more than their competitors can.

“As we continue to give our growing client list the market’s best, most flexible and integrated range of personalization applications, we’re uniquely positioned to turn customer data into high and sustained ROI for our clients.”

- ENDS -

About Qubit

Qubit is the pioneer in delivering data-first customer experiences.

Qubit offers a blank canvas for businesses to deliver their big ideas. Whether it’s acting on data science or creating highly targeted personalizations, we fuel innovation and ensure marketers are never held back by digital roadblocks.

Our digital experience hub integrates analytics, segmentation, A/B testing, and web personalization with the Visitor Cloud, a real-time data supply chain connecting data across all your brand touchpoints through a single view of the customer. This infrastructure allows marketers to run powerful personalizations at scale involving multiple data sources, and it supports custom development by your engineering team.

Qubit has been recognized by Forrester as a marketing-centric technology with “proprietary, best-in-breed offering” for web and mobile analytics as well as testing and optimization. We’re trusted to deliver real impact to the bottom line for the biggest brands in ecommerce including TOPSHOP, Uniqlo, John Lewis, Net A Porter, bebe, and Staples.

To date, we have received $76 million in funding from Accel Partners, Balderton Capital, Goldman Sachs, Salesforce Ventures and Sapphire Ventures.

About Goldman Sachs

Since 1986, the Merchant Banking Division of Goldman Sachs has raised over $140 billion of capital in equity, credit and real estate funds to invest in a variety of geographies, industries and transaction types. With Merchant Banking representatives in six countries around the world, Goldman Sachs is one of the largest managers of private capital globally, offering deep expertise and longstanding relationships with companies, investors, entrepreneurs and financial intermediaries. Goldman Sachs is leading global investment banking, securities and investment management firm that provides a wide range of financial services to a substantial and diversified client base that includes corporations, financial institutions, governments and high-net-worth individuals. Founded in 1869, the firm is headquartered in New York and maintains offices in all major financial centers around the world. Further information on Goldman Sachs can be found on the website: www.goldmansachs.com

About Sapphire Ventures

Sapphire Ventures is focused on helping today’s most innovative technology companies become global category-defining leaders. Leveraging nearly two decades of experience and an extensive global enterprise network, Sapphire Ventures invests capital, resources and expertise to enable its portfolio companies to scale rapidly. Whether entrepreneurs sell to businesses, consumers or both, Sapphire Ventures offers a powerful platform for business development and operational excellence to help them accelerate growth. With $1.4 billion under active management via direct growth investments and an early-stage fund investment strategy, Sapphire Ventures is uniquely positioned to elevate companies to the global stage. Find us in Palo Alto and London and at www.sapphireventures.com. Follow us @sapphirevc

About Accel

Accel is a leading early and growth-stage venture capital firm, powering a global community of entrepreneurs. Accel backs entrepreneurs who have what it takes to build a world-class, category-defining business. Founded in 1983, Accel brings more than three decades of experience building and supporting hundreds of companies. Accel's vision for entrepreneurship and business enables it to identify and invest in the companies that will be responsible for the growth of next-generation industries. Accel has backed a number of iconic global platforms, which are powering new experiences for mobile consumers and the modern enterprise, including Atlassian, BlaBlaCar, Dropbox, Etsy, Facebook, Flipkart, Funding Circle, Kayak, QlikTech, Simplivity, Slack, Spotify, Supercell, WorldRemit and others.

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.

1 Gartner, 2015 CEO Survey: Committing to Digital, 10 April 2015    

Contacts

Qubit

Mark Choueke

+44 7832 139827









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