Vancouver-based software company Klue has secured $79.2 million CAD ($62 million USD) in Series B financing to fuel the expansion of its competitor intelligence platform.
The startup’s all-equity Series B round closed in October and was led by Tiger Global with participation from Salesforce Ventures. Klue’s latest round, which included a small amount of secondary capital, brings the company’s total funding to date to approximately $103.5 million CAD ($81 million USD).
Klue uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help product marketers collect, curate, and provide insights about competitors. The goal is to enable revenue teams to use these insights to win more business for their companies.
Since securing $19.7 million CAD last fall, Klue has seen a threefold increase in its customer base.
Since securing $19.7 million CAD in Series A capital last fall, Klue has seen a threefold increase in its customer base. The startup aims to use its fresh funding to build on this growth, accelerate its product and machine learning development plans, and power its expansion into new verticals and markets.
“When you don’t understand your competitive landscape, you can’t outperform it,” said Jason Smith, CEO and co-founder of Klue. “Klue is building the system of record for compete. We want to give every department of every business a relevant, contextual, continuously updated lens into their competitors and market.”
Today, Klue serves over 100,000 users and more than 300 enterprise clients, including SAP, Shopify, Cisco, 3M, and Dell EMC. The startup is ranked among the top competitive intelligence software companies on the market.
To date, Klue has focused primarily on serving B2B tech companies and sales teams. Now, the company is looking to expand beyond tech and into the financial, manufacturing, telecom, and healthcare sectors. The startup also has its sight set on selling to product, strategy, customer service, and talent acquisition teams.
After establishing a presence in North America, Klue is also focused on geographic expansion, as it looks to move into Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the Asia-Pacific region.
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The startup’s creators, Smith and CTO Sarathy Naicker, drew from past experience at Alida, Electronic Arts, and Sophos, to create Klue. Smith previously served as the president of Alida (then Vision Critical) for seven years. In Alida’s early days, Smith helped grow the company, known for its customer insights products, to more than 500 employees, $50 million in revenue, and over 500 enterprise clients.
Smith and Naicker began working on Klue in 2015, and the startup launched out of stealth in 2017 with $4 million in venture capital.
Over the years, Klue has amassed a group of investors that includes Hootsuite’s Ryan Holmes, Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest, Shopify’s VP of product Daniel Debow, OMERS Ventures, Rhino Ventures, BDC Capital, and Craft Ventures.
As companies look for ways to stand out from the competition and turn to data to make that happen, the past few years have proved to be a boon for Klue, which tripled its revenue every year over the three-year period from 2017 to 2020. According to Smith, the company is on track to see double to triple year-over-year revenue growth again in 2021.
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With those numbers, Klue was named to Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 list this year, ranking 12th after experiencing three-year revenue growth of 2,418 percent between 2017 and 2020. Other companies featured on Deloitte’s list alongside Klue included Snapcommerce, Maple, ApplyBoard, and fellow British Columbia software company Thinkific.
Klue also recently secured the ‘tech culture of the year’ award at the recent Technology Impact Awards hosted by BC Tech.
In addition to Klue, Tiger Global has backed a number of Canadian tech startups in recent months, including Toronto-based FinTech startups Float and Wrapbook, Toronto-based restaurant software company ResQ, and Vancouver-based sales software startup Dooly.
“Klue is at the forefront of changing the way business leaders approach building their strategies, as the demand for competitive intelligence is exploding,” said John Curtius, partner at Tiger Global, adding that most existing tools and processing options fail to meet the immediate needs of enterprises. Curtius referred to Klue as a company that is “disrupting the status quo.”
UPDATE (12/01/21): This story has been updated to include responses from Jason Smith of Klue.
Feature image courtesy of Klue