Vitally, a rising star in the customer success space, announced Wednesday it raised $9 million in Series A funding from VC heavyweight Andreessen Horowitz. With more than 100 active customers, including familiar names like Calendly and Zapier, Vitally has tripled its revenue over the last year and shows no signs of slowing down as customer success grows increasingly important to companies’ post-pandemic growth.
A graduate of TechStars NYC’s 2017 accelerator program, Vitally was created with the mission of other customer success platforms — to reduce churn, improve account expansion and facilitate revenue growth. What sets Vitally apart is its ability to measure a business’s relationship with each customer using analytics, automation and plug-and-play integrations. This allows teams to address sales opportunities and churn prevention automatically.
This kind of technology has become essential as we shift into what Vitally CEO and co-founder Jamie Davidson calls the “3rd wave” of the B2B SaaS sector. Davidson went on to say customer success is a “logical successor” to what traditional CRM and sales automation software has been doing for the last 15 years and what marketing automation software has been doing for the last 10 years. As more companies shift their go-to-market strategy from traditional top-down sales to one that focuses on retention and expansion, they need to be armed with “quality, forward-looking tools,” he said.
“This has been the trajectory of software companies for the past half-decade, but this trend has accelerated in a post-COVID world. Focusing on achieving greater success with your existing customer base is a more sustainable way to drive growth and is especially important in times of economic uncertainty,” Davidson told Built In via email. “Accordingly, the C-Suite now has increased focus on customer success. The mentality is no longer customer success as ‘the last line of defense,’ but rather ‘the first line of defense.’”
Davidson added that this investment from Andreessen Horowitz is a sign that Vitally is on the right path in this burgeoning market. Indeed, David Ulevitch, a general partner at the VC firm, says customer success automation is a “crucial piece” of scaling a SaaS business these days, and projects Vitally will “win the space” going forward.
“We’re excited to lead Vitally's Series A and help them deliver on their vision of making customer success a science,” Ulevitch said in a statement provided to Built In. “As more companies move operations online in a post-COVID world and adopt more SaaS products, and as SaaS companies themselves orient go-to-market strategies around product-led growth, customer success automation represents a massive market need and opportunity.”
Andreessen Horowitz fully funded this Series A round, and Ulevitch will be joining Vitally’s board of directors as part of the deal. The money will be used to expand Vitally's operations, including marketing and product development. The company is also hiring, with a handful of open tech positions at its Brooklyn headquarters.
Going forward, Davidson says the company would like to keep focusing on small B2B SaaS businesses, as well as enterprise companies, saying this kind of technology is “not always an option” for smaller businesses. He added that Vitally plans to work more closely with the broader ecosystem of SaaS products.
“Customer success and customer experience are top priorities for software companies, VCs, and business analysts alike,” Davidson said. “The customer success market is evolving quickly and Vitally is proud to be at the forefront.”
