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Box unwraps its answer to the $3.8B e-signature market: Box Sign
Box released its new native e-signature product Box Sign on Monday, providing e-signature capability and unlimited signatures as part of Box’s business and enterprise plans at no additional cost.
The launch comes five months after the Redwood City, California-based company agreed to acquire e-signature startup SignRequest for $55 million.
Box CEO Aaron Levie told TechCrunch the company is already securing content management for 100,000 businesses, and Box Sign represents “a breakthrough product for the company” — a new category in which Box can help customers with business processes.
“We are building out a content cloud that powers the lifecycle of content so customers can retain and manage it,” Levie said. “Everyday, there are more transactions around onboarding a customer, closing a deal or an audit, but these are still done manually. We are moving that to digital and enabling the request of signatures around the content.”
Here’s how it works: Users can send documents for e-signature directly from Box to anyone, even those without a Box account. Places for signature requests and approvals can be created anywhere on the document. All of this integrates across popular apps like Salesforce and includes email reminders and deadline notifications. As with Box’s offerings, the signatures are also secure and compliant.
The global e-signature software market was estimated to be around $1.8 billion in 2020, according to Prescient & Strategic Intelligence, while IDC expects it to grow to $3.8 billion by 2023.
Levie considers the market still early as less than one-third of organizations use e-signature due to legacy tool limitations and cost barriers, revealing massive future opportunities. However, that may be changing: Box worked with banks during the pandemic that were still relying on mailing, scanning and faxing documents to help them adapt to digital processes. It also surveyed its customers last year around product capabilities, and the No. 1 “ask” was e-signature, he said.
He mentioned major players DocuSign and Adobe Sign — two products it will continue to integrate with — among the array of technology within the space. He said that Box is not trying to compete with any player, but saw a need from customers and wanted to proceed with an option for them.
The e-signature offering also follows the hiring of Diego Dugatkin in June as Box’s new chief product officer. Prior to joining, Dugatkin was vice president of product management for Adobe Document Cloud and led strategy and execution for Adobe’s suite of products, including Adobe Sign.
“Our strategy has been for many years to expand our portfolio and power more advanced use cases, as well as a vision to have one platform to manage everything,” Levie said. “Diego has two decades of tremendous domain experience, and he will make a massive dent in powering this for us.”
In addition to the e-signature product, Box also introduced its Enterprise Plus plan that includes all of the company’s major add-ons, as well as advanced e-signature capabilities that will be available later this summer, the company said.
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With Workfront, Adobe combines automated workflow with customer experience
Five months ago, Adobe purchased (for $1.5 billion) Workfront, a company that helps build marketing department workflows. Today the company is officially announcing how it intends to use it. As marketing executives try to balance mapping strategy to the creative process while building customized experiences, a marketing workflow tool would fit neatly into Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), and that’s where it has landed.
Alex Shootman, who was CEO at Workfront and is now VP and GM of Adobe Workfront, told me they see the tool as the system of record for the marketing department inside of AEM. While there is more than a hint of marketing in that explanation, the data from Workfront’s workflows acts as a record of the creative process.
As part of Adobe, the company has built hooks into Experience Manager and Creative Cloud to enable marketing’s creative work to move through an organized and auditable process, leaving a data trail that lets management know exactly what happened — a marketing system of record.
Shootman says having this system of record in place allows marketing teams to do several things. For starters, it lets them connect strategy to execution. “If you think about a CMO, he or she and their team is developing the key priorities for decisions for the year or for the quarter [and this helps them] take those key priorities and make sure that they are driving the activities within the marketing organization,” he said.
He says that involves connecting the people, processes and data within marketing into a single system where teams can iteratively plan on the work as changes arise. That’s where Workfront comes into play.
Brent Leary, lead analyst at CRM Essentials, says the approach makes a great deal of sense. “Creating enough personalized content at scale to stay connected with customers as their needs evolve over time is a team sport. That calls for tighter collaboration throughout the creation process, and Workfront within the AEM brings a sophisticated project management capability to the creative process,” Leary said.
During the pandemic, that became imperative as the majority of sales moved online. That increased the need for speed and agility. Having this workflow tool in place inside the Adobe Experience Manager means it’s not only allowing marketing to build customized experiences for its customers, it also enables them to automate the workflows behind those customizations.
The way this could work in practice is a marketing team creates a campaign and maps it out in Workfront. From there, creatives get assigned tasks and these tasks show up in Creative Cloud. When they complete the assignment, it automatically goes back into Workfront where it will be reviewed, eventually get approved and get published to the Digital Asset Management (DAM) tool where it will be available for use by the entire marketing team.
When it comes to acquisitions, it’s hard to know how well they’ll turn out, but Workfront seems particularly well suited to the Adobe ecosystem, a tool that can help bring a missing workflow automation component to the entire creative process, while allowing marketing execs to see exactly how their strategy played out.
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Adobe launches a new, simplified digital asset manager
Adobe today announced the launch of a new asset management tool, Adobe Experience Manager Assets Essentials. That’s a mouthful, but while the company didn’t necessarily simplify the name, the idea here is to give teams that work with lots of digital assets an easier-to-use management experience in the Adobe Experience Cloud than Adobe’s current enterprise-centric asset management tool can offer.
In addition, Adobe is also launching the first tool to integrate this new experience: the Adobe Journey Optimizer. This new tool is meant to help users leverage their customer data to build out customer journeys and figure out the best ways to deliver messages and content along that journey.
“The push towards digital content and building these richer, engaging experiences — customers expect it,” Elliot Sedegah, director of Strategy and Product Marketing, Adobe, told me. “Almost every interaction that you go along, you expect a rich experience. And not only at that point of just having richer material, like images or video, etc., but you expect it at every point of interaction with that customer. So that customer, if you think of it, isn’t just interacting with a brand, but our customers, they think of it as a customer journey. So using the same content, from awareness to conversion to post-sale and loyalty — they expect that same story to maintain. And it’s getting increasingly hard to get to all the different touchpoints.”
Image Credits: Adobe
Like with similar products, the idea here is to create a centralized, collaborative space for content creators and the teams that use their work. In that respect, this new tool isn’t necessarily all that different from other shared online file management services. But Adobe is also leveraging some of its unique capabilities. It’s using its AI smarts and Adobe Sensei platform to help users organize and tag their assets, for example, to make them more easily searchable. And the new tool is integrated with Adobe Asset Link, so creative professionals can search, browse and edit these assets directly from Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and XD without having to switch context.
As Sedegah noted, not too long ago, it was mostly the creative teams and marketing that were involved in the content creation and management process. But today, this group also includes sales teams and customer support, for example, and the pandemic only accelerated this process.
Image Credits: Adobe
“[Our customers] have been forced to rethink their business models, rethink the way that they engage with customers — and it essentially accelerated this digital-everywhere process of the experiences customers get, the agility that customers expect from businesses, and then the number of people — and how they work — leveraging that content.”
So while Adobe’s enterprise asset management tools worked just fine before, the company’s users were telling it that it needed to do a better job at creating tools that made its asset management technology easier to use by more teams.
The first tool to integrate this new asset management experience directly is the Journey Optimizer. “That was a great opportunity for us to rethink that user experience that our customers wanted to deliver — and then make it easier for that person to do,” Sedegah said. “So as you’re building out a content journey — or maybe you’re designing a piece of content that’s going to get sent to maybe a customer as they engage with a brand — the digital assets appear right there for that author to use.”
Next up for integration is Workfront, the work management platform Adobe acquired last year. There’s an obvious synergy here between Workfront’s abilities to manage the planning, review and approval stages of a project and an asset management system like this.
The long-term strategy, though, is to integrate this experience across all Experience Cloud applications.
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Nobl9 raises $21M Series B for its SLO management platform
SLAs, SLOs, SLIs. If there’s one thing everybody in the business of managing software development loves, it’s acronyms. And while everyone probably knows what a Service Level Agreement (SLA) is, Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Indicators (SLIs) may not be quite as well known. The idea, though, is straightforward, with SLOs being the overall goals a team must hit to meet the promises of its SLA agreements, and SLIs being the actual measurements that back up those other two numbers. With the advent of DevOps, these ideas, which are typically part of a company’s overall Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) efforts, are becoming more mainstream, but putting them into practice isn’t always straightforward.
Nobl9 aims to provide enterprises with the tools they need to build SLO-centric operations and the right feedback loops inside an organization to help it hit its SLOs without making too many trade-offs between the cost of engineering, feature development and reliability.
The company today announced that it has raised a $21 million Series B round led by its Series A investors Battery Ventures and CRV. In addition, Series A investors Bonfire Ventures and Resolute Ventures also participated, together with new investors Harmony Partners and Sorenson Ventures.
Before starting Nobl9, co-founders Marcin Kurc (CEO) and Brian Singer (CPO) spent time together at Orbitera, where Singer was the co-founder and COO and Kurc the CEO, and then at Google Cloud, after it acquired Orbitera in 2016. In the process, the team got to work with and appreciate Google’s site reliability engineering frameworks.
As they started looking into what to do next, that experience led them to look into productizing these ideas. “We came to this conclusion that if you’re going into Kubernetes, into service-based applications and modern architectures, there’s really no better way to run that than SRE,” Kurc told me. “And when we started looking at this, naturally SRE is a complete framework, there are processes. We started looking at elements of SRE and we agreed that SLO — service level objectives — is really the foundational part. You can’t do SRE without SLOs.”
As Singer noted, in order to adopt SLOs, businesses have to know how to turn the data they have about the reliability of their services, which could be measured in uptime or latency, for example, into the right objectives. That’s complicated by the fact that this data could live in a variety of databases and logs, but the real question is how to define the right SLOs for any given organization based on this data.
“When you go into the conversation with an organization about what their goals are with respect to reliability and how they start to think about understanding if there’s risks to that, they very quickly get bogged down in how are we going to get this data or that data and instrument this or instrument that,” Singer said. “What we’ve done is we’ve built a platform that essentially takes that as the problem that we’re solving. So no matter where the data lives and in what format it lives, we want to be able to reduce it to very simply an error budget and an objective that can be tracked and measured and reported on.”
The company’s platform launched into general availability last week, after a beta that started last year. Early customers include Brex and Adobe.
As Kurc told me, the team actually thinks of this new funding round as a Series A round, but because its $7.5 million Series A was pretty sizable, they decided to call it a Series A instead of a seed round. “It’s hard to define it. If you define it based on a revenue milestone, we’re pre-revenue, we just launched the GA product,” Singer told me. “But I think just in terms of the maturity of the product and the company, I would put us at the [Series] B.”
The team told me that it closed the round at the end of last November, and while it considered pitching new VCs, its existing investors were already interested in putting more money into the company and since its previous round had been oversubscribed, they decided to add to this new round some of the investors that didn’t make the cut for the Series A.
The company plans to use the new funding to advance its roadmap and expand its team, especially across sales, marketing and customer success.
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Adobe expands Acrobat Web, adds PDF text and image editing
For the longest time, Acrobat was Adobe’s flagship desktop app for working with — and especially editing — PDFs. In recent years, the company launched Acrobat on the web, but it was never quite as fully featured as the desktop version, and one capability a lot of users were looking for, editing text and images in PDFs, remained a desktop-only feature. That’s changing. With its latest update to Acrobat on the web, Adobe is bringing exactly this ability to its online service.
“[Acrobat Web] is strategically important to us because we have more and more people working in the browser,” Todd Gerber, Adobe’s VP for Document Cloud, told me. “Their day begins by logging into whether it’s G Suite or Microsoft Office 365. And so we want to be in all the surfaces where people are doing their work.” The team first launched the ability to create and convert PDFs, but as Gerber noted, it took a while to get to the point where being able to edit PDFs in a performant and real-time way was possible. “We could have done it earlier, but it wouldn’t have been up to the standards of being fast, nimble and quality.” He specifically noted that working with fonts was one of the more difficult problems the team faced in bringing this capability online.
He also noted that even though we tend to think of PDF as an Adobe format, it is an open standard and lots of third-party tools can create PDFs. That large ecosystem, with the potential for variations between implementations, also makes it more difficult to offer editing capabilities for Adobe.
With today’s launch, Adobe is also introducing a couple of additional browser-based features: protecting PDFs, splitting them into two and merging multiple PDFs. In addition, after working with Google last year to offer a handful of Acrobat shortcuts using the .new domain, Adobe is now launching a set of new shortcuts like EditPDF.new. The company plans to roll out more of these over the course of the next year.
In total, Adobe says, the company saw about 10 million clicks on its existing shortcuts, which just goes to show how many people try to convert or sign PDFs every day.
As Gerber noted, a lot of potential users don’t necessarily think of Acrobat first. Instead, what they want to do is compress a PDF or convert it. Acrobat Web and the .new domains help the company bring a new audience to the platform, he believes. “It’s unlocking a new audience for us that didn’t initially think of Adobe. They think about PDFs, they think about what they need to do with them,” he said. “So it’s allowing us to expand our customer base by being relevant in the way that they’re looking to discover and ultimately transact. Our journey with Acrobat web actually started with that notion: let’s go after the non-branded searches.”
Adobe, of course, funnels to the Acrobat desktop app all branded searches where users are explicitly looking for Acrobat, but for the more casual user, it brings them to Acrobat Web where they can easily perform whatever action they came for without even signing up for the service.
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Goodbye Flash, goodbye FarmVille
While much of what made 2020 such an absolute nightmare will still be with us on January 1 (sorry!), we will really, truly be leaving Adobe Flash and FarmVille behind as we enter the new year.
The end of Flash has been a long time coming. The plugin, which was first released in 1996 and once supported a broad swath online content, has become increasingly irrelevant in a smartphone-centric world: iPhones never supported Flash, and it’s been just over 10 years since Apple’s then-CEO Steve Jobs published an open letter outlining the technology’s shortcomings.
Adobe has been planning for the end, announcing in 2017 that it would phase out Flash by the end of this year. Most web browsers have already stopped supporting Flash, and today is the official end date, with Adobe ending support itself — although there’s still one last “death of Flash” milestone on January 12, when the company will begin to block Flash content from playing.
In related news, Zynga announced recently that the end of Flash would also mean the end of FarmVille, since the game relies on the Flash plugin.
Like Flash, FarmVille feels like a remnant of a bygone internet era (a fact that makes me feel incredibly old, since I wrote plenty of words about both of them at the beginning of my career). Launched in 2009, FarmVille’s popularity paved the way for the ascendance of Zynga and of Facebook gaming, but both Zynga and gaming have largely moved on.
The company’s co-founder and former CEO Mark Pincus commemorated the occasion with a series of tweets outlining the game’s early development (spurred by the acquisition of startup MyMiniLife).
“FarmVille demonstrated that a game could be a living, always-on service that could deliver daily surprise and delight, similar to a favorite TV series,” Pincus wrote. “Games could also connect groups of people and bring them closer together.”
And just in case there are any FarmVille fans reading this story, don’t worry: you can still play FarmVille 2: Tropic Escape, FarmVille 2: Country Escape right now, and FarmVille 3 is still coming to mobile. Today is just the final day for the original game.
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Adobe acquires marketing workflow startup Workfront for $1.5B
Adobe just announced that it is acquiring marketing workflow management startup Workfront for $1.5 billion. Bloomberg first reported the sale earlier today.
Workfront was founded back in 2001, making it a bit long in the tooth for a private company that has raised $375 million, according to Crunchbase. (It’s worth noting that $280 million of that was secondary money raised last year.)
The acquisition gives Adobe more online marketing tooling to fit into its Experience Cloud. This one helps companies manage complex projects inside the marketing department (or elsewhere in the company, for that matter).
Suresh Vittal, VP of platform and product for Adobe Experience Cloud, said that the two companies often work together and encounter one another’s sales teams. As the pandemic has played out, it began to make more sense to bring in-house this kind of tooling that works well in a distributed environment, and over the last several months the deal came together.
“The new normal distributed marketing team, distributed experience delivery teams, people having to work remotely — we started to see new use cases emerge around the idea of work management, around the idea of content velocity, around the idea of providing compliance and governance capabilities so no asset escapes the organization, and it goes through this process of passing through creative and the marketing teams and getting out there and really representing your brand in the right way,” Vittal explained.
Workfront CEO Alex Shootman sees the deal as a way to accelerate the roadmap while working with a much larger company. “We are barely scratching the surface of marketing and we could grow tremendously, just by having that great kind of integrated relationship,” he said.
Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research, says the acquisition will help Adobe customers manage the complexities of marketing project management. “Scheduling and managing work had gotten orders of magnitude more complex for enterprises, and Adobe is accounting for that with the acquisition of Workfront, providing better tool support for the new future of work,” Mueller told TechCrunch.
Workfront’s 960 employees will become part of Adobe and become part of the Adobe Experience Cloud. Shootman will continue to run it and report to Anil Chakravarthy, executive vice president and general manager of the digital experience business at Adobe.
Workfront’s customers include Home Depot, T-Mobile and Deloitte, and the two companies share 1,000 common customers among Workfront’s 3,000 total customer base. In fact, it has APIs that connect to Adobe Creative Cloud and Experience Cloud, two parts of the company’s product family that marketers frequently access.
As Adobe battles Salesforce, SAP and Oracle in the marketing automation space, it’s been using its checkbook to acquire additional fire power in recent years. This acquisition comes after Adobe spent $1.6 billion for Magento and $4.75 billion for Marketo in 2018. That’s almost $8 billion for three companies in less than two years, even as it builds out parts of its Adobe Experience Cloud in-house. Combined, it shows just how serious the company is about making headway in this valuable area.
Customer experience has always been an essential element of online and in-person transactions, making sure the customer feels good about the interactions it has with a brand. It not only keeps them coming back, but it encourages them to act as ambassadors on behalf of a company, something that has incredible value.
Conversely, a bad experience can lead to the opposite impact, causing a prospective or even loyal customer to abandon a brand and speak badly about it to friends online and in person. Adobe hopes that by bringing another marketing tool into the fold, it can help its customers increase the likelihood of a positive online customer experience. This one should allow marketing personnel working at a company to move marketing projects through a workflow from idea to delivery.
The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of Adobe’s fiscal year. Per usual, it will be subject to typical regulatory scrutiny.
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Adobe beefs up developer tools to make it easer to build apps on Experience Cloud
Adobe has had a developer program for years called Adobe.io, but today at the Adobe Developers Live virtual conference, the company announced some new tools with a fresh emphasis on helping developers build custom apps on the Adobe Experience Cloud.
Jason Woosley, VP of developer experience and commerce at Adobe, says that the pandemic has forced companies to build enhanced digital experiences much more quickly than they might have, and the new tools being announced today are at least partly related to helping speed up the development of better online experiences.
“Our focus is very specifically on making the experience-generation business something that’s very attractive to developers and very accessible to developers so we’re announcing a number of tools,” Woosley told TechCrunch.
The idea is to build a more complete framework over time to make it easier to build applications and connect to data sources that take advantage of the Experience Cloud tooling. For starters, Project Firefly is designed to help developers build applications more quickly by providing a higher level of automation than was previously available.
“Project Firefly creates an extensibility framework that reduces the boilerplate that a developer would need to get started working with the Experience Cloud, and extends that into the customizations that we know every implementation eventually needs to differentiate the storefront experience, the website experience or whatever customer touch point as these things become increasingly digital,” he said.
In order to make those new experiences open to all, the company is also announcing React Spectrum, an open source set of libraries and tools designed to help members of the Adobe developer community build more accessible applications and websites.
“It comes with all of the accessibility features that often get forgotten when you’re in a race to market, so it’s nice to make sure that you will be very inclusive with your design, making sure that you’re bringing on all aspects of your audiences,” Woosley said.
Finally, a big part of interacting with Experience Cloud is taking advantage of all of the data that’s available to help build those more customized interactions with customers that having that data enables. To that end, the company is announcing some new web and mobile software development kits (SDKs) designed to help make it simpler to link to Experience Cloud data sources as you build your applications.
Project Firefly is available in developer preview starting today. Several React Spectrum components and some data connection SDKs are also available today. The company intends to keep adding to these various pieces in the coming months.
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Adobe’s ‘Liquid Mode’ uses AI to automatically redesign PDFs for mobile devices
We’ve probably all been there: You’ve been poking around your phone for an hour, deep in some sort of Google research rabbit hole. You finally find a link that almost certainly has the info you’ve been looking for. You tap it… aaaand it’s a 50-page PDF. Now you get to pinch and zoom your way through a document that’s clearly not meant for a screen that fits in your hand.
Given that the file format is approaching its 30th birthday, it makes sense that PDFs aren’t exactly built for modern mobile devices. But neither PDFs nor smartphones are going away anytime soon, so Adobe has been working on a way to make them play nicely together.
This morning Adobe is launching a feature it calls “Liquid Mode.” Liquid Mode taps Adobe’s AI engine, Sensei, to analyze a PDF and automatically rebuild it for mobile devices. It uses machine learning to chew through the PDF and try to work out what’s what — like the font changes that indicate a new section is starting, or how data is being displayed in a table — and reflow it all for smaller screens.
After a few months of quiet testing, Liquid Mode is being publicly rolled out in Adobe’s Acrobat Reader app for iOS and Android today, with plans to bring it to desktops later. Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis also tells me they’ve been working on an API that’ll allow similar functionality to be rolled into non-Adobe apps down the road.
When you open a PDF in Acrobat Reader, the app will try to determine if it’ll work with Liquid Mode; if so, the Liquid Mode button lights up. Tap the button and the file is sent to Adobe’s Document Cloud for processing. Once complete, users can tweak to their liking things like the font size and line spacing. Liquid Mode will use the headers/structure it detects to build a tappable table of contents where none existed before, allowing you to quickly hop from section to section. The whole thing is non-destructive, so nothing actually changes about the original PDF. Step back out of Liquid Mode and you’re back at the original, unmodified PDF.
Image Credits: Adobe
We first heard about Adobe’s efforts here earlier this year; in an Extra Crunch interview back in January, Parasnis outlined Adobe’s plans to bring AI and machine learning into just about everything the company does. Parasnis tells me that Liquid Mode is just the first step in giving Sensei an understanding of documents. Later, he notes, they want users to be able to hand Sensei a 30-page PDF and have it return a summary just a few pages long.
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Contentful raises $80M Series E round for its headless CMS
Headless CMS company Contentful today announced that it has raised an $80 million Series E funding round led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation from General Catalyst, Salesforce Ventures and a number of other new and existing investors. With this, the company has now raised a total of $158.3 million and a Contentful spokesperson tells me that it is approaching a $1 billion valuation.
In addition, the company also today announced that it has hired Bridget Perry as its CMO. She previously led Adobe’s marketing efforts across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Currently, 28% of the Fortune 500 use Contentful to manage their content across platforms. The company says it has a total of 2,200 paying customers right now and these include the likes of Spotify, ITV, the British Museum, Telus and Urban Outfitters.
Steve Sloan, the company’s CEO who joined the company late last year, attributes its success to the fact that virtually every business today is in the process of figuring out how to become digital and serve its customers across platforms — and that’s a process that has only been accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic.
“Ten or 15 years ago, when these content platforms or content management systems were created, they were a) really built for a web-only world and b) where the website was a complement to some other business,” he said. “Today, the mobile app, the mobile web experience is the front door to every business on the planet. And that’s never been any more clear than in this recent COVID crisis, where we’ve seen many, many businesses — even those that are very traditional businesses — realize that the dominant and, in some cases, only way their customers can interact with them is through that digital experience.”
But as they are looking at their options, many decide that they don’t just want to take an off-the-shelf product, Sloan argues, because it doesn’t allow them to build a differentiated offering.
Image Credits: Contentful
Perry also noted that this is something she saw at Adobe, too, as it built its digital experience business. “Leading marketing at Adobe, we used it ourselves,” she said. “And so the challenge that we heard from customers in the market was how complex it was in some cases to implement, to organize around it, to build those experiences fast and see value and impact on the business. And part of that challenge, I think, stemmed from the kind of monolithic, all-in-one type of suite that Adobe offered. Even as a marketer at Adobe, we had challenges with that kind of time to market and agility. And so what’s really interesting to me — and one of the reasons why I joined Contentful — is that Contentful approaches this in a very different way.”
Sloan noted that putting the round together was a bit of an adventure. Contentful’s existing investors approached the company around the holidays because they wanted to make a bigger investment in the company to fuel its long-term growth. But at the time, the company wasn’t ready to raise new capital yet.
“And then in January and February, we had inbound interest from people who weren’t yet investors, who came to us and said, ‘hey, we really want to invest in this company, we’ve seen the trend and we really believe in it.’ So we went back to our insiders and said, ‘hey, we’re going to think about actually moving in our timeline for raising capital,” Sloan told me. “And then, right about that time is when COVID really broke out, particularly in Western Europe in North America.”
That didn’t faze Contentful’s investors, though.
“One of the things that really stood out about our investors — and particularly our lead investor for this round Sapphire — is that when everybody else was really, really frightened, they were really clear about the opportunity, about their belief in the team and about their understanding of the progress we had already made. And they were really unflinching in terms of their support,” Sloan said.
Unsurprisingly, the company plans to use the new funding to expand its go-to-market efforts (that’s why it hired Perry, after all), but Sloan also noted that Contentful plans to invest quite a bit into R&D, as well, as it looks to help its customers solve more adjacent problems.
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