Clari: How Modern Companies Drive and Manage Revenue
Clari raises $150M Series E to execute on its vision of the end-to-end RevOps platform
On behalf of the team at BCV and especially my partners Aaref Hilaly, Enrique Salem, and Jeff Williams who all have been heavily involved, we at BCV are thrilled about Clari’s $150M raise which marks a major milestone for the company and for the space that Clari has pioneered, Revenue Operations (RevOps). I first met Andy and Venkat in early 2014 when the company had a handful of early design partners and very little revenue. The founders shared with me that the initial solution being used by these pilot customers was just the tip of the iceberg and represented step one along the journey to the broader Clari vision of an AI system that powered ALL revenue related workflow. I was blown away by the vision and said to Andy and Venkat, “I don’t know if you can build this or if anyone can, but if you do, every company in the world will buy this!” The good news is that 6 years later, Clari has successfully built and deployed their RevOps platform to hundreds of modern, fast-growing companies who use Clari as their primary cockpit for driving revenue.
From Systems of Record to Systems of Engagement
The history of business software for the past thirty years has been all about automating specific functional business workflows. Manufacturing bought ERP software, finance purchased a general ledger and planning software, HR was in charge of an HRIS, marketing purchased marketing automation, and IT purchased help desk solutions. This dynamic created the behemoths of the client-server era (SAP, Siebel, Oracle, and Peoplesoft) and the more recent behemoths of cloud (Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow). As business software has moved from systems of record to systems of engagement, the next generation of companies are attacking strategic business functions that are cross-functional. Procure-to-Pay, Order-to-cash, Customer experience are all examples of multi-functional core business processes that require a new generation of software products that sit on top of the existing systems of record to drive business value.
The Rise of RevOps
Perhaps the most important business process for any high growth company is Revenue Operations (RevOps). RevOps is the end-to-end system that ties together ALL the business functions — sales, marketing, account management, customer success, support, finance and engineering — in the lifecycle of driving growth and revenue.
Clari has built a platform that ingests data from every customer-facing enterprise system including email, slack, calendar, CRM, marketing automation and many others and captures this time-series data in its data infrastructure. On top of this infrastructure sits Clari’s AI engine which is continuously analyzing this torrent of real-time data to help guide the revenue leaders in the company with forecasts, predictions, analysis, intelligence, and recommended actions. For the first time, business leaders can dynamically see the changes in the pipeline, starting with top of funnel lead flow all the way down to the revenue “commit” for the quarter and extending into customer renewals and upsells.
Real-time Instrumentation for Revenue
The companies that have adopted Clari have abandoned spreadsheets, static powerpoints slides, and screenshots from CRM as the way the Exec Team and Board drive revenue and manage the business. Instead, the fastest growing companies leverage the real-time visibility and instrumentation of Clari to understand the state of the pipeline, the forecast for the current quarter, the status of customer health and renewals, and the productivity of the sales team. In more and more board meetings across the BCV portfolio, the revenue update happens in Clari giving us a dynamic view into the business and where the bottlenecks to growth are. This is how modern companies should manage and drive growth. For the growth leaders who have experienced Clari, there is no going back to the old way of doing things.
We are grateful to be partnered with Andy, Venkat and the entire team at Clari. We are blown away by progress the company has made, their extraordinary growth since our initial investment, their tireless commitment and leadership that got us here, their values and culture which are present in everything they do, and most of all the exciting opportunities we see ahead for the company!
