Clari raises $60 million for AI sales pipeline optimization tools

Clari, a startup developing an end-to-end sales analytics and forecasting platform for enterprises, today announced that it’s raised $60 million in series D funding led by Sapphire Ventures, following on the heels of a $60 million series C round in March 2018 and a $20 million series B round in June 2014. (Madrona Venture Group and existing investors Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, and Tenaya Capital also participated.) The influx of capital brings the Sunnyvale, California-based company’s total raised to date to over $135 million, which CEO Andy Byrne said will accelerate the growth of its partner ecosystem and its investments in new AI-driven offerings.

Clari’s upward trajectory impressed investors, no doubt. It’s on track to grow 200% year-over-year, and its revenue operations platform — which processed over $300 billion in pipeline value this year — currently supports over 25,000 sales, marketing, customer success, and go-to-market clients across hundreds of companies (including Qualtrics, Lenovo, Adobe, Dropbox, Lenovo, Zoom, Medallia, Datadog, and Okta) in 170 countries.

“Revenue isn’t just an outcome at the end of a 90-day quarter, it’s a dynamic, moment-to-moment business process,” said Byrne. “It can be controlled, measured and optimized like any other critical function in the business. We’re using AI and Automation to help our customers transform their revenue operations to be more connected, efficient and predictable.”

Above: Clari’s cloud dashboard.

Image Credit: Clari

Clari, which Byrne cofounded with Venkat Rangan in 2012, provides a toolset that aims to improve productivity and reduce churn by ingesting and analyzing signals from dozens of different enterprise sources. It’s able to spot deal risk and manage pipeline health automatically, and to integrate sales and marketing activity data from email clients, calendars, customer relationship management software, and marketing automation platforms like RingCentral, LinkedIn, Slack, and Gong. Moreover, it tracks deal history with a time-series database tailor-made for revenue operations, which bidirectionally feeds into integrated apps to keep contacts, deals, and more up to date.

From customizable dashboards, sales team leaders can see reps’ prospect engagements and opportunities, as well as which of their target accounts are being engaged. A leaderboard highlights top performers, while an insights component identifies at-risk deals and tracks closure trends over time.

Helpfully, Clari ships with a coaching component that enables team members and managers to study previous quarters, and to project whether they’ll hit target metrics based on long- and short-term historical patterns. It allows them to create multiple forecast views and to back them up with likely-to-close opportunities, and it delivers intelligent alerts via email and mobile about updating opportunities after customer meetings.

“Growth and retention are the lifeblood of Chief Revenue Officers,” said Sapphire Ventures managing director Jai Das. “CROs from many of our portfolio companies depend on Clari to manage their end-to-end revenue process to drive efficiency and predictability. What Clari’s AI is calling has become an integral part of most boards’ parlance, since revenue forecasts are discussed so much. Increasingly Clari is being used by the broader revenue operations team, including marketing and customer success, to not only see how leads are converting to customers, but also to predict which customers will churn and which are primed for upsells. I believe Clari is an indispensable platform for revenue operations teams in every enterprise.”

Clari occupies a sales enablement market that’s projected to be worth $2.6 billion by 2024, according to Markets and Markets. It competes with People.ai, which recently raised $60 million at roughly a $500 million valuation for its cloud-hosted predictive sales tools, as well startups like Datahug, InsightSquared, RevOps, Funnel Cake, and Inside Sales.

But there’s plenty of customers to go around. According to a Salesforce survey conducted last year year, nearly half of all salespeople believe that AI has a role to play in guided selling capabilities like opportunity rankings, and about 66% characterize machine learning’s ability to glean customer sentiment and engagement as “transformative.” Meanwhile, 65% say AI-powered insights into business developments, emails, and calendar data would “make them more effective in their job.”