Domo, the SaaS business intelligence startup launched by Omniture founder Josh James, has raised $125 million in a round led by TPG Growth, the middle market and growth equity investment platform of TPG. This brings the company’s total funding to $250 million. Salesforce.com, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity Investments, Morgan Stanley, Viking Ventures and Dragoneer Investment Group also participated, as did previous investors GGV Capital, Greylock Partners, IVP and Mercato Partners. Allen & Company LLC served as an advisor.
Previous backers have included Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment company of Jeff Bezos; CEOs of Workday Aneel Bhusri and David Duffield; Founders Fund, Sorenson Capital, Benchmark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, Marc Benioff, WPP, SuccessFactors founder and a16z founder Lars Darlgaard and Hummer Winblad. The company was valued at more than $300 million post-money in its last round, but in this round, Domo was valued at $825 million, post-money.
James is famous for founding Omniture, a web analytics SaaS company that went public and was subsequently bought by Adobe in 2009 for $1.8 billion. In 2011, James debuted Domo, with $33 million in funding from Benchmark, aiming to tackle the business intelligence space. Domo also purchased a company in the past called Corda.
Domo has been notoriously quiet about its product for raising as much money as it has from a list of marquee investors.
As we’ve heard, the company puts BI in the cloud, but in a scalable and easy-to-use format so people can actually make sense of (and make money off of) massive amounts of business data. The application is able to analyze business data and display it in a user-friendly and real-time format. Basically, Domo takes all the data in an organization and puts it into a platform that allows you to interact with data in a way executives have never been able to do. “Domo eliminates meetings, and picks up the speed at which companies can do things,” he explains. “We’re bridging the gap between the marketing funnel and the sales funnel.”
For example, a Fortune 500 retailer is using Domo to see what colors of products are selling in real time, and adjusting manufacturing and supply chain management in real time. James says that prior to using Domo, the company had to wait months to analyze sales data and then make changes in other business areas. Another retailer is using the SaaS to allow branch managers to see which stores are selling the most items and which items are selling in real time.
Mobile is a big component of both usage and development for Domo. Most of the company’s customers are accessing Domo via mobile devices, says James, and that is a strong consideration in development as well.
As of the fall, Domo was doubling customers, and today, Domo has around 500 customers, ranging from Fortune 500 companies to small businesses. Customers come from a variety of industries, including media and marketing, telco, retail, travel and leisure, technology, financial services and professional services. And James says that the company is seeing a 98 percent retention rate around customers.
As for the whole secrecy thing, James believes that other companies in the analytics and BI space could watch what Domo is doing and copy it — he’s fine with things remaining stealthy until the company has big enough scale. He anticipates more details coming out around the product in the next 12 months.
The new money will be spent to innovate on the product, paying particular attention to making the setup of Domo, which connects to all business processes and software (i.e. CRMs, sales data, etc.), easier for companies. “People can say what they want about me raising $250 million, but investors have seen everything and that says I am telling the truth about the product,” he said, adding that revenue has grown 100 percent over the past year.
Domo also intends to double the company’s sales team with the new funding, as well as add engineers. International expansion is happening organically but eventually Domo will pursue markets outside the U.S. with more purpose. While seeing names like Fidelity and T Rowe in the list of investors is a signal towards a possible IPO, we’re told an IPO is at least two to three years away.
Domo isn’t the only company trying to tackle business intelligence — Good Data is also playing in the space, as is Birst.
But considering the way the enterprise market is moving, and with the enormous amounts of data being churned out by businesses, there can be a few large players in this space. James has told us in the past that he wants to build the most significant enterprise tech company since Salesforce. The fact that Salesforce is betting on James and Domo is a good sign that James’ goal could come to fruition in some time.
Comment