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Hear how to scale to $100M ARR at Disrupt 2020
At Disrupt this year TechCrunch is digging into the $100 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) threshold. To help us explore the software revenue milestone, we’re bringing in a number of CEOs that have already reached it: Egnyte’s Vineet Jain, GitLab’s Sid Sijbrandij and Kaltura’s Michal Tsur.
Join us on the Extra Crunch stage to hear this session, along with several other sessions around how founders can navigate the choppy startup waters. You can snag a ticket here.
The modern software world, often called software as a service, or SaaS, operates against a well-defined set of inflection points. These include $1 million ARR, a key moment for startups looking to raise their first Series-defined round of capital; the $10 million ARR mark, at which point the same companies become hard to kill; and $100 million ARR, at which point startups can start to prep for a public offering, or regular, large capital raises from private investors.
It’s that last milestone we want to explore. With three executives from companies that we’ve included in our series on $100 million ARR companies, we’ll dig into what they had to learn the hard way as they grew to material business scale, what went well and what they might be able to share with startups that aspire to a similar level of success.
That we’ll be hosting the conversation during a mini-IPO wave will make it all the more exciting; these three business leaders will certainly have at least one eye on the public markets. And as we’ll have the chat in the shadow of COVID-19, we’ll learn about how the highly valued private companies have had to adapt to a changed economic environment and working setup.
We’ll lean into lessons, learnings and other operational questions with the CEO of Egnyte, an enterprise content and management service provider; the CEO of GitLab, a DevOps company that has long had a distributed-employee model that is incredibly pertinent to the current moment; and the president of Kaltura, a software company that powers online video for other companies.
Since TechCrunch started compiling a list of companies that had either reached $100 million ARR, or were on their way, we’ve collected dozens of firms to the list. The three we’re talking to are among the most interesting. At a minimum, the conversation should be an interesting look into the next set of leaders in the software and startup space. See you there.
You can read our entries from the $100 million ARR series on each firm below:
Disrupt is happening for five action-packed days — September 14-18 — and if you want to partake in this session (or any other session on the Extra Crunch stage), you’ll need to get your Digital Pro Pass for just $345 for a limited time. Or if you are a founder, showcase your startup in Digital Startup Alley for just $445 for you PLUS another member of your team. Get your pass today!
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Startups are helping cloud infrastructure customers avoid vendor lock-in
For much of the history of enterprise technology, companies tended to buy from a single vendor because it made managing the entire affair much easier while giving them a “single throat to choke” when something went wrong. On the flip side, it also put customers at the mercy of said vendor — and it wasn’t always pretty.
As we move deeper into the cloud model, many IT pros are looking for more flexibility than they had in the past, avoiding the vendor lock-in from the previous generation of enterprise tech, and what being beholden to a single vendor could mean for the bottom line and their own flexibility.
This is something that comes up frequently in discussions about moving workloads from one cloud to another, and is sometimes referred to as a multi-cloud approach. Customers are loath to leave their workloads in the hands of one vendor again and repeat the mistakes of the past. They are looking to have the same flexibility on the infrastructure side that they are getting in the SaaS world, where companies tend to purchase best-of-breed from multiple vendors.
That means, they want the freedom to move workloads between clouds, but that’s not always as easy a prospect as it might seem, and it’s an area where startups could help lead the way.
What’s the problem?
What’s stopping customers from just moving data and applications between clouds? It turns out that there is a complex interlinking of public cloud APIs that help the applications and data work in tandem. If you want to pull out of one public cloud, it’s not a simple matter of just migrating to the next one.
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Egnyte unifies its security and productivity tooling into single platform
Egnyte announced today it was combining its two main products — Egnyte Protect and Egnyte Connect — into a single platform to help customers manage, govern and secure the data from a single set of tools.
Egynte co-founder and CEO Vineet Jain says that this new single platform approach is being driven chiefly by the sheer volume of data they are seeing from customers, especially as they shift from on-prem to the cloud.
“The underlying pervasive theme is that there’s a rapid acceleration of data going to the cloud, and we’ve seen that in our customers,” Jain told TechCrunch. He says that long-time customers have been shifting from terabytes to petabytes of data, while new customers are starting out with a few hundred terabytes instead of five or ten.
As this has happened, he says customers are asking for a way to deal with this data glut with a single platform because the volume of data makes it too much to handle with separate tools. “Instead of looking at this as separate problems, customers are saying they want a solution that helps address the productivity part at the same time as the security part. That’s because there is more data in the cloud, and concerns around data security and privacy, along with increasing compliance requirements, are driving the need to have it in one unified platform,” he explained.
The company is doing this because managing the data needs to be tied to security and governance policies. “They are not ultimately separate ideas,” Jain says.
Jain says, up until recently, the company saw the data management piece as the way into a customer, and after they had that locked down, they would move to layer on security and compliance as a value-add. Today, partly due to the data glut and partly due to compliance regulations, Jain says, these are no longer separate ideas, and his company has evolved its approach to meet the changing requirements of customers.
Egnyte was founded in 2007 and has raised over $138 million on a $460 million post valuation, according to Pitchbook data. Its most recent round was $75 million led by Goldman Sachs in September, 2018. Egnyte passed the $100 million ARR mark in November.
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Egnyte brings native G Suite file support to its platform
Egnyte announced today that customers can now store G Suite files inside its storage, security and governance platform. This builds on the support the company previously had for Office 365 documents.
Egnyte CEO and co-founder Vineet Jain says that while many enterprise customers have seen the value of a collaborative office suite like G Suite, they might have stayed away because of compliance concerns (whether that was warranted or not).
He said that Google has been working on an API for some time that allows companies like Egnyte to decouple G Suite documents from Google Drive. Previously, if you wanted to use G Suite, you no choice but to store the documents in Google Drive.
Jain acknowledges that the actual integration is pretty much the same as his competitors because Google determined the features. In fact, Box and Dropbox announced similar capabilities over the last year, but he believes his company has some differentiating features on its platform.
“I honestly would be hard pressed to tell you this is different than what Box or Dropbox is doing, but when you look at the overall context of what we’re doing…I think our advanced governance features are a game changer,” Jain told TechCrunch.
What that means is that G Suite customers can open a document and get the same editing experience as they would get were they inside Google Drive, while getting all the compliance capabilities built into Egnyte via Egnyte Protect. What’s more, they can store the files wherever they like, whether that’s in Egnyte itself, an on-premises file store or any cloud storage option that Egnyte supports, for that matter.
G Suite documents stored on the Egnyte platform
Long before it was commonplace, Egnyte tried to differentiate itself from a crowded market by being a hybrid play where files can live on-premises or in the cloud. It’s a common way of looking at cloud strategy now, but it wasn’t always the case.
Jain has always emphasized a disciplined approach to growing the company, and it has grown to 15,000 customers and 600 employees over 11 years in business. He won’t share exact revenue, but says the company is generating “multi-millions in revenue” each month.
He has been talking about an IPO for some time, and that remains a goal for the company. In a recent letter to employees that Egnyte shared with TechCrunch, Jain put it this way. “Our leadership team, including our board members, have always looked forward to an IPO as an interim milestone — and that has not changed. However, we now believe this company has the ability to not only be a unicorn but to be a multi-billion dollar company in the long-term. This is a mindset that we all need to have moving forward,” he wrote.
Egnyte was founded in 2007 and has raised more than $137 million, according to Crunchbase data.
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Egnyte hauls in $75M investment led by Goldman Sachs
Egnyte launched in 2007 just two years after Box, but unlike its enterprise counterpart, which went all-cloud and raised hundreds of millions of dollars, Egnyte saw a different path with a slow and steady growth strategy and a hybrid niche, recognizing that companies were going to keep some content in the cloud and some on prem. Up until today it had raised a rather modest $62.5 million, and hadn’t taken a dime since 2013, but that all changed when the company announced a whopping $75 million investment.
The entire round came from a single investor, Goldman Sachs’ Private Capital Investing arm, a part of Goldman’s Special Situations group. Holger Staude, vice president of Goldman Sachs Private Capital Investing will join Egnyte’s board under the terms of the deal. He says Goldman liked what it saw, a steady company poised for bigger growth with the right influx of capital. In fact, the company has had more than eight straight quarters of growth and have been cash flow positive since Q4 in 2016.
“We were impressed by the strong management team and the company’s fiscal discipline, having grown their top line rapidly without requiring significant outside capital for the past several years. They have created a strong business model that we believe can be replicated with success at a much larger scale,” Staude explained.
Company CEO Vineet Jain helped start the company as a way to store and share files in a business context, but over the years, he has built that into a platform that includes security and governance components. Jain also saw a market poised for growth with companies moving increasing amounts of data to the cloud. He felt the time was right to take on more significant outside investment. He said his first step was to build a list of investors, but Goldman shined through, he said.
“Goldman had reached out to us before we even started the fundraising process. There was inbound interest. They were more aggressive compared to others. Given there was prior conversations, the path to closing was shorter,” he said.
He wouldn’t discuss a specific valuation, but did say they have grown 6x since the 2013 round and he got what he described as “a decent valuation.” As for an IPO, he predicted this would be the final round before the company eventually goes public. “This is our last fund raise. At this level of funding, we have more than enough funding to support a growth trajectory to IPO,” he said.
Philosophically, Jain has always believed that it wasn’t necessary to hit the gas until he felt the market was really there. “I started off from a point of view to say, keep building a phenomenal product. Keep focusing on a post sales experience, which is phenomenal to the end user. Everything else will happen. So this is where we are,” he said.
Jain indicated the round isn’t about taking on money for money’s sake. He believes that this is going to fuel a huge growth stage for the company. He doesn’t plan to focus these new resources strictly on the sales and marketing department, as you might expect. He wants to scale every department in the company including engineering, posts-sales and customer success.
Today the company has 450 employees and more than 14,000 customers across a range of sizes and sectors including Nasdaq, Thoma Bravo, AppDynamics and Red Bull. The deal closed at the end of last month.
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Egnyte Connect lets business users access files wherever they live
The cloud was supposed to solve the file access problem. The trouble is that when you work for a big company, some of your files may live in the cloud and others on-prem. How do you access all of those files regardless of where they live? Egnyte hopes to settle all of that with the launch of Egnyte Connect for the desktop today. Egnyte has always tried to separate itself from Box and Dropbox… Read More
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Egnyte announces deep partnership with Microsoft…at Dreamforce
Egnyte announced today that moving forward, it would be using Microsoft Azure as its primary cloud partner. While it would continue to support other cloud vendors like market leader AWS, it likely means that the company sees the best way to succeed inside the Azure ecosystem.
In an interesting twist, instead of making the announcement last week at Microsoft’s Ignite conference, Egnyte… Read More
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Egnyte pushes beyond storage into document protection
Egnyte has gotten as creative as it could as an online storage company. You could store your files on Egnyte in the cloud, on prem or with a competing storage service if you liked, but the company recognized that storage can only take you so far. Today it announced some new approaches designed to expand beyond that original storage vision. “As a pure-play stand-alone strategy,… Read More
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