The COVID-19 pandemic and specifically need for social distancing to slow the spread of the virus have continued to keep many of us away from the office. Now, increasingly, many organizations and people believe that it could usher in a more permanent shift to remote, distributed and virtual work. Today, a startup that has built a set of tools specifically to help salespeople with that change — by way of digital sales — has raised a substantial growth round to meet that demand.

SalesLoft, a sales platform based out of Atlanta, Georgia that provides AI-based tools to help salespeople run their sales process virtually — from finding and following up on leads, through to helping them sell with virtual coaching tools, and then assisting in the post-sales process — has closed $100 million in funding.

The company’s co-founder and CEO Kyle Porter confirmed to TechCrunch that the company is now valued at $1.1 billion post-money, a substantial hike on its previous valuation. In April 2019, well before any global health pandemics, the company had raised a Series D of $70 million at around a $600 million valuation (a figure we confirmed at the time with sources close to the company).

This latest round is being led by Owl Rock Capital, with previous investors Insight Partners, HarbourVest, and Emergence Capital — a VC focused specifically on enterprise startups, which notably was an early backer of Zoom and many others — also participating.

SalesLoft has now raised some $245 million, an impressive sum for any startup, but also worth pointing out for the fact that it’s not based out of the Valley but Atlanta, Georgia (a state in the news for other reasons at the moment, as the focus of a hotly contested U.S. Senate runoff election).

The company has been on a growth tear for several years now, as one of the big players in the area of so-called sales engagement: tools to help salespeople sell better to clients (or would-be clients), which can include real-time monitoring of interactions to provide coaching to improve the process, suggestions for supplementary content to enhance the pitch and more basic software simply to manage records and communications.

Even before the pandemic hit, this was a key growth area in enterprise software, with both in-person and online/digital salespeople relying on these kinds of products to help them get more of an edge with their work, but a lot of the focus had really been on inside sales (B2B sales focusing on bigger purchases). Porter described the effect of COVID-19 as a “tailwind” propelling that already strong trend.

“The effects of COVID have been a tailwind due to the effects of digital selling,” he said. “All sellers immediately became remote. But now the genie is out of the bottle and not going back in. It’s meant that inside sales are now all sales. Whether the opportunities are mid-funnel or upgrades or renewals, we are establishing ourselves as the engagement platform of record because it’s all becoming digital and all sellers are finding more success.”

He added that SalesLoft’s own sales cycle has improved by 40% since the pandemic, a reflection, he said, of the “urgency and need” for tools like those that the startup develops.

Another shift has been in terms of the kinds of customers SalesLoft works with. The company originally was focused on the mid-market, but that has changed with more larger enterprises also coming on board. Google, LinkedIn (which backs SalesLoft and is in a strategic partnership with it), Cisco, Dell and IBM are all customers, and Porter said that more “mainstream” businesses like Cargil, 3M and Standard & Poor are also increasingly becoming clients.

That is leading the startup to building out bigger solutions, beyond the basic pitch of “sales engagement” that has been SalesLoft’s mainstay up to now. The company competes against a plethora of others, including Clari, Chorus.ai, Gong, Conversica, Afiniti and Outreach, as well as biggies like Salesforce. Outreach, notably, had a big mid-COVID round of its own, raising at a $1.3 billion valuation in June last year, a mark of that wider market demand. Porter notes that SalesLoft’s big selling point is that it offers an increasingly end-to-end sales solution to customers, meaning less shopping around.

Segment, the startup Twilio bought last fall for $3.2 billion, was just beginning to take off in 2015 when it ran into a scaling problem: It was growing so quickly, the tools it had built to process marketing data on its platform were starting to outgrow the original system design.

Inaction would cause the company to hit a technology wall, managers feared. Every early-stage startup craves growth and Segment was no exception, but it also needed to begin thinking about how to make its data platform more resilient or reach a point where it could no longer handle the data it was moving through the system. It was — in a real sense — an existential crisis for the young business.

Segment’s engineering team began thinking hard about what a more robust and scalable system would look like. As it turned out, their vision would evolve in a number of ways between the end of 2015 and today, and with each iteration, they would take a leap in terms of how efficiently they allocated resources and processed data moving through its systems.

The project that came out of their efforts was called Centrifuge, and its purpose was to move data through Segment’s data pipes to wherever customers needed it quickly and efficiently at the lowest operating cost. This is the story of how that system came together.

Growing pains

The systemic issues became apparent the way they often do — when customers began complaining. When Tido Carriero, Segment’s chief product development officer, came on board at the end of 2015, he was charged with finding a solution. The issue involved the original system design, which like many early iterations from startups was designed to get the product to market with little thought given to future growth and the technical debt payment was coming due.

“We had [designed] our initial integrations architecture in a way that just wasn’t scalable in a number of different ways. We had been experiencing massive growth, and our CEO [Peter Reinhardt] came to me maybe three times within a month and reported various scaling challenges that either customers or partners of ours had alerted him to,” said Carriero.

The good news was that it was attracting customers and partners to the platform at a rapid clip, but it could all have come crashing down if the company didn’t improve the underlying system architecture to support the robust growth. As Carriero reports, that made it a stressful time, but having come from Dropbox, he was actually in a position to understand that it’s possible to completely rearchitect the business’s technology platform and live to tell about it.

“One of the things I learned from my past life [at Dropbox] is when you have a problem that’s just so core to your business, at a certain point you start to realize that you are the only company in the world kind of experiencing this problem at this kind of scale,” he said. For Dropbox that was related to storage, and for Segment it was processing large amounts of data concurrently.

In the build-versus-buy equation, Carriero knew that he had to build his way out of the problem. There was nothing out there that could solve Segment’s unique scaling issues. “Obviously that led us to believe that we really need to think about this a little bit differently, and that was when our Centrifuge V2 architecture was born,” he said.

Building the imperfect beast

The company began measuring system performance, at the time processing 8,442 events per second. When it began building V2 of its architecture, that number had grown to an average of 18,907 events per second.

When Salesforce acquired Quip in 2016 for $750 million, it gained CEO and co-founder Bret Taylor as part of the deal. Taylor has since risen quickly through the ranks of the software giant to become president and COO, second in command behind CEO Marc Benioff. Taylor’s experience shows that startup founders can sometimes play a key role in the companies that acquire them.

Benioff, 56, has been running Salesforce since its founding more than 20 years ago. While he hasn’t given any public hints that he intends to leave anytime soon, if he wanted to step back from the day-to-day running of the company or even job share the role, he has a deep bench of executive talent including many experienced CEOs, who like Taylor came to the company via acquisition.

He and his wife Lynne have been active in charitable giving and in 2016 signed The Giving Pledge, an initiative from the The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to give a majority of their wealth to philanthropy. One could see him wanting to put more time into pursuing these charitable endeavors just as Gates did 20 years ago. As a means of comparison, Gates founded Microsoft in 1975 and stayed for 25 years until he left in 2000 to run his charitable foundation full time.

Even if this remains purely speculative for the moment, there is a group of people behind him with deep industry experience, who could be well-suited to take over should the time ever come.

Resurrecting the co-CEO role

One way to step back from the enormous responsibility of running Salesforce would be by sharing the role. In fact, for more than a year starting in 2018, Benioff actually shared the top job with Keith Block until his departure last year. When they worked together, the arrangement seemed to work out just fine with Block dealing with many larger customers and helping the software giant reach its $20 billion revenue goal.

Before Block became co-CEO, he had a myriad other high-level titles including co-chairman, president and COO — two of which, by the way, Taylor has today. That was a lot of responsibility for one person inside a company the size of Salesforce, but promoting him to co-CEO from COO gave the company a way to reward his hard work and help keep him from jumping ship (he eventually did anyway).

As Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research points out, the co-CEO concept has worked out well at major enterprise companies that have tried it in the past, and it helped with continuity. “Salesforce, SAP and Oracle all didn’t miss a beat really with the co-CEO departures,” he said.

If Benioff wanted to go back to the shared responsibility model and take some work off his plate, making Taylor (or someone else) co-CEO would be one way to achieve that. Certainly, Brent Leary, lead analyst at CRM Essentials sees Taylor gaining increasing responsibility as time goes along, giving credence to the idea.

“Ever since Quip was acquired Taylor seemed to be on the fast track, becoming president and chief product officer less than a year-and-a-half after the acquisition, and then two years later being promoted to chief operating officer,” Leary said.

Who else could be in line?

While Taylor isn’t the only person who could step into Benioff’s shoes, he looks like he has the best shot at the moment, especially in light of the $27.7 billion Slack deal he helped deliver earlier this month.

“Taylor being publicly praised by Benioff for playing a significant role in the Slack acquisition, Salesforce’s largest acquisition to date, shows how much he has solidified his place at the highest levels of influence and decision-making in the organization,” Leary pointed out.

But Mueller posits that his rapid promotions could also show something might be lacking with internal options, especially around product. “Taylor is a great, smart guy, but his rise shows more the product organization bench depth challenges that Salesforce has,” he said.

Applications based on artificial intelligence — whether they are systems running autonomous services, platforms being used in drug development or to predict the spread of a virus, traffic management for 5G networks or something else altogether — require an unprecedented amount of computing power to run. And today, one of the big names in the world of designing and building processors fit for the task has closed a major round of funding as it takes its business to the next level.

Graphcore, the Bristol, U.K.-based AI chipmaker, has raised $222 million, a Series E that CEO and co-founder Nigel Toon said in an interview will be used for a couple of key purposes.

First, Graphcore will use the money to continue expanding its technology, based around an architecture it calls “IPU” (intelligence processing unit), which competes against chips from the likes of Nvidia and Intel also optimized for AI applications. And second, Graphcore will use the funding to shore up its finances ahead of a possible public listing.

The funding, Toon said, gives Graphcore $440 million in cash on the balance sheet and a post-money, $2.77 billion valuation to start 2021.

“We’re in a strong position to double down and grow fast and take advantage of the opportunity in front of us,” he added. He said it could be “premature” to describe this Series E as a “pre-IPO” round. “We have enough cash and this puts us in a position to take that next step,” he added. The company has in recent weeks been rumored to be eyeing up a listing not in the U.K. but on Nasdaq in the U.S.

This latest round of funding is coming from a roster of financial investors. Led by the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, it also includes participation from Fidelity International and Schroders, as well as previous investors Baillie Gifford and Draper Esprit. Graphcore has now raised some $710 million to date.

This Series E gives Graphcore a definite step up in its valuation — the company last raised money back in February of this year, a $150 million extension to its Series D that valued the company at $1.95 billion — but all the same, it closes off what Toon described as a “challenging” year for the company (and indeed, the world at large). 

“I view this year as a speed bump,” he said. “It has been challenging and we’ve realigned to speed things up.”

As it has been for many companies, the year came in different parts.

On one side, Graphcore’s hardware and software product development continued apace with ever-faster processors in ever-smaller packages. In July, Graphcore launched the second generation of its flagship chip, the GC200, and a new IPU Machine that runs on it, the M2000, which the company described at the time as the first AI computer to achieve a petaflop of processing power “in the size of a pizza box.”

But on the other side, the building and launch of those products was largely done with a remote workforce, with employees sent to work from home to help slow down the spread of the coronavirus that has gripped the world and rewritten how much of it operates.

Indeed, the industry at large, and how companies are spending and investing during a period of uncertainty, has also likely shifted. Some companies like Amazon, Apple and Google are all getting more serious about their own chipmaking efforts. Others are caught up in a wave of consolidation: Witness Nvidia’s efforts to acquire ARM in a $40 billion deal.  

All of these spell challenges for an upstart like Graphcore. Toon said Graphcore doesn’t have any plans to make acquisitions: Its strategy is based around organic growth.

And, no great surprises here, he is not excited about Nvidia’s acquisition of ARM: “If we’re not careful, things will consolidate too much and that could kill off innovation,” he said. “We have made our position clear to the U.K. government. We don’t think the Nvidia ARM deal is a good thing.” (Somewhat ironic, considering he and Graphcore co-founder Simon Knowles sold a previous startup to none other than Nvidia.)

He also declined to talk about new customers for Graphcore, but he said that there has been interest from financial services companies, and some from the world of healthcare, automotive and internet companies, “large hyperscalers” in his words, that require the kind of technology that Graphcore is building either to run their systems, or to complement processors that they are potentially also building themselves. (Strategic backers of the company include the likes of Microsoft, BMW, Bosch and Dell.)

Graphcore said that the company is shipping its newest products “in production volume” to customers, and Toon said that a couple of big names are likely to be announced in the coming year, one that some believe might actually be calmer overall for the chip industry compared to 2020.

It’s that pull of technology, and specifically the processing demands of the next generation of computing, that investors believe will continue to drive business to Graphcore as the dust settles on this year.

“The market for purpose-built AI processors is expected to be significant in the coming years because of computing megatrends like cloud technology and 5G and increased AI adoption, and we believe Graphcore is poised to be a leader in this space,” said Olivia Steedman, senior managing director, Teachers’ Innovation Platform (TIP) at Ontario Teachers’. “TIP focuses on investing in tech-enabled businesses like Graphcore that are at the forefront of innovation in their sector. We are excited to partner with Nigel and the strong management team to support the company’s continued growth and product development.”