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.

From COVID-19’s curve to election polls, public temperature checks to stimulus checks, 2020 was dominated by numbers — the guiding compass of any self-respecting venture capital investor.

As a VC exclusively focused on investments in Israeli cybersecurity, the numbers that guide us have become some of the most interesting to watch over the course of the past year.

The start of a new year presents the perfect opportunity to reflect on the annual performance of Israel’s cybersecurity ecosystem and prepare for what the next twelve months of innovation will bring. With the global cybersecurity market outperforming this year’s panic-stricken expectations, we carefully combed through the figures to see how Israel’s market, its strongest performer, compared — and predict what it has in store.

The “cyber nation” not only remained strong throughout the pandemic, but even saw a rise in fundraising, especially around application and cloud security, following the emergence of remote workflow security gaps brought on by social distancing. Encouraged by this, investors have demonstrated committed enthusiasm to its growth and M&A landscape.

Emboldened by the sector’s overall strength and new opportunities, today’s Israeli visionaries are developing stronger convictions to build larger companies; many of them, already successful entrepreneurs, are making their own bets in the industry as serial entrepreneurs and angel investors.

Image Credits: YL Ventures (opens in a new window)

The numbers also reveal how investors are increasingly concentrating their funds on larger seed rounds for serial entrepreneurs and the foremost industry trends. More than $2.75 billion was poured into the industry this year to back companies across all stages, a 97% increase from last year’s $1.39 billion. If its long-term slope is any indication, we can only expect it to continue to grow.

However, though they clearly indicate progress, the numbers still make the need for a demographic reset clear. Like the rest of the industry, Israel’s cybersecurity ecosystem must adapt to the pace of change set out by this year’s social movements, and the time has long passed for true diversity and gender representation in cybersecurity leadership.

Seed rounds reveal fascinating shifts

As the market’s biggest leaders garner experience and expertise, the bar for entry to Israel’s cybersecurity startup ecosystem has gradually risen over the years. However, this did not appear to impact this year’s entrepreneurial breakthroughs. 58% of Israel’s newly founded cybersecurity companies received seed rounds this year, totaling 64 seeded companies in 2020 compared with last year’s 61. The total number of newly founded companies increased by 5%, reversing last year’s downward trend.

The amount invested at seed hit an all-time high as average deal size in 2020 increased by 11%, amounting to an average of $5.2 million per deal. This continues an upward trend in average seed rounds, which have surged over the last four years due to sizable year-on-year increases. It also provides further support for a shift toward higher caliber seed rounds with a strategically focused and “all-in” approach. In other words, founders that meet the new bar for entry are raising bigger rounds for more ambitious visions.

Image Credits: YL Ventures

Where is the money going?

2020 proved an exceptional year for application security and cloud security startups. Perhaps the runaway successes of Snyk and Checkmarx left strong impressions. This year saw an explosive 140% increase in application security company seed investments (such as Enso Security, build.security and CloudEssence), as well as a whopping 200% increase in cloud security seed investments (like Solvo and DoControl), from last year.