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Cloud-based communication and collaboration platforms are the name of the game today in enterprise software, and now\u00a0one of the still-independent leaders\u00a0in that space is announcing a significant round at a hefty price\u00a0to ride the wave of growth. Smartsheet<\/a>, the Bellevue, Washington-based startup that has built spreadsheet software that lets people set and manage tasks and work across teams of people, has picked up $52 million, in what CEO Mark Mader tells me was a pre-money valuation of $800 million ($852 million post-money).<\/p>\n The valuation, notably, is a massive, tenfold leap for Smartsheet. When it last raised money in 2014, the company was valued<\/a> only around $75-80 million. This Series F, which brings the total raised by the company to $120 million, was led by previous investor Insight Venture Partners, with Madrona Venture Group and Sutter Hill Ventures, and new investor Summit Partners also participating.<\/p>\n Why the big\u00a0jump in valuation? Part of it has to do with growth of the company itself, and partly with the current climate for socially-minded enterprise software.<\/p>\n Smartsheet, Mader said in an interview, has been\u00a0growing at a rate of about 60 percent a year for the past five years, with a $100 million annual run rate, and intentionally run not for profit as it continues to grow. The company currently has about 70,000 businesses paying to use the product, ranging from SMBs through to large enterprises. This works out to around 550,000 licensed customers, and \u201ca few million\u201d people who use it free of charge, he said.<\/p>\n Smartsheet\u2019s business model is, as with many cloud-based services, freemium. Everyone can access documents for free, and you only pay if you want access to edit or update a Smartsheet document. This low barrier to entry, where Smartsheet \u201cmonetises only those who are initiating and creating work on the platform,\u201d as Mader puts it, essentially lures in many users, some of whom eventually convert to paying customers. (Tiers range<\/a> from $14 to $25 per user based on your business size, or at a custom rate for large organisations.)<\/p>\n The drive to use Smartsheet is coming from a bigger trend in the market: there has been a large shift from using\u00a0software hosted by a company itself, or installed directly on your device, to products that are sold, distributed and accessed in the cloud.<\/p>\n Smartsheet was an early mover in that space, opening up for business in 2006 as an alternative to the likes of Excel and other spreadsheet packages on the market, with a firm focus on offering a way for multiple people to collaborate in those documents to use them more dynamically.<\/p>\n In other words, if Excel found a purpose as a place where multiple people could dip in to monitor the progress of something, Smartsheet was created from the start with that in mind.<\/p>\n Fast forwarding several years, the cloud architecture that\u00a0Smartsheet focused on early has become something of the norm in the business world, with companies like Slack \u2014 focused more on communication across teams and apps \u2014 and Dropbox and Box \u2014 looking at the storage component \u2014 now leading the charge and forcing the hand of\u00a0much larger players like Microsoft to follow\u00a0along.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are documents and communication tools and file synchronization and sharing in the cloud,\u201d Mader\u00a0said, \u201cand we see automation and work tracking as the final domino in that space.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Today, Smartsheet integrates with several but not all of these: part of the funding will be used to expand that list from a current roster that includes the likes of Box, Dropbox and Teams from Microsoft, but not, for example, Slack. That integration is coming later this year, Mader said.<\/span><\/p>\n