\u201cDigital transformation\u201d has been on the mind of many an organization in the last year: the pandemic and the shift it\u2019s brought to how we work are speeding up investments in new apps, infrastructure and work practices to improve productivity regardless of where we sit all day. Now, it looks like we\u2019re on to the next stage of that journey: actually figuring out how to adopt and run with all that new tech.<\/p>\n
In a sign of the times, today a startup called Whatfix<\/a> \u2014 which has built a platform that helps make better use of tech investments by giving chatbot-style guidance to users on how to use apps, with the option also to apply AI to understand what a person is doing to suggest what actions to take next \u2014 is announcing $90 million in funding. It will use the money to continue expanding its tech platform and hiring more talent to meet demand, said CEO Khadim Batti, who co-founded the company with Vara Kumar (CTO), in an interview this week.<\/p>\n Sources close to the company \u2014 co-headquartered in San Jose and Bangalore \u2014 confirmed that the Series D round was made at a valuation of around $600 million, triple Whatfix\u2019s value in its Series C round last year.<\/p>\n That sharp rise is due in part to the state of the market today, but also the company\u2019s growth within that bigger trend. Whatfix today has some 500 global customers on its books, The Netherlands Red Cross, Experian, Sentry Financial Services, Cardinal Health Canada, BMC Software Inc., and Bausch Lomb among them. Some 75% of its business is coming out of the U.S., with another 18% from Europe. Revenues in the last six months have been growing at a rate of 100% quarter-on-quarter.<\/p>\n \u201cThis pandemic has proven an inflection point for adoption,\u201d said Batti (pictured above, left with Kumar, right).<\/p>\n This latest tranche of equity funding is coming from a mix of financial and strategic investors.<\/p>\n SoftBank\u2019s Vision Fund 2 is leading the round, with Eight Roads Ventures, Sequoia Capital India, Dragoneer Investment Group, F-Prime Capital and Cisco Investments also investing. The company has raised just under $140 million in total.<\/p>\n \u201cDigital adoption solutions\u201d \u2014 the general term describing what Whatfix has built \u2014 have become a popular solution for enterprises that have found themselves in an IT pickle, Batti said.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve seen more than $500 billion spent on enterprise software, with areas like SaaS growing very fast. There is so much there, and every employee has access to do better work. But most are not adopting or using that software. This means a lot [of inefficiency] in \u2018digital transformation,’\u201d said Batti. \u201cWe are focusing on fixing this problem.\u201d<\/p>\n Digital adoption and digital experience overall can come in many forms these days.<\/p>\n They include assistants that are embedded directly into apps themselves (with some versions of this \u2014 such as Clippy on Word \u2014 nearly as old as software itself). The category also includes separate platforms that integrate at the back end with the apps that you use, providing not just a single ingestion point for data but intelligence on how best to use it, and what to use. (Dooly<\/a> for sales teams is an example of that, although I don\u2019t know if it would describe itself as a \u201cdigital adoption solution\u201d per se.)<\/p>\n Others like Pendo<\/a> are geared more at observing how your sites and apps are being adopted and used by others. And there are a number of others out there specifically looking at digital adoption by enterprises and competing directly with Whatfix: they include Apty, Userlane, Applearn.<\/p>\n One of the biggest \u2014 WalkMe \u2014 yesterday announced an IPO<\/a> at an estimated $2.5 billion valuation.<\/p>\n