InsideSales.com raises $50 million to accelerate sales

InsideSales.com, a company that provides sales acceleration software, today announced a $50 million funding round.

Based in Silicon Slopes, Utah, the company provides Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) that collects, segments, and classifies data to create tailored recommendations for sales representatives who are using a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, such as Salesforce. The software is built on Neuralytics, a predictive self-learning engine.

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“We’re basically looking at the way categories of people behave within various different situations,” chief executive Dave Elkington told VentureBeat in an interview. “The mistake people are making is thinking the value is in building the best algorithm. The key is in the data.”

The company says it has more than 2,000 customers — including ADP, Groupon, and Microsoft — who pay $25 to $295 per user per month when billed annually. According to Elkington, InsideSales.com customers experience revenue growth up to 30 percent in as little as 90 days. Competitors include Five9, SalesLoft, and Velocify.

InsideSales.com recently launched Playbooks, a browser plugin that follows the user around the internet — something that is particularly pertinent to millennials, who work in more unpredictable ways.

“About a year ago, we conducted a study to understand the buying and selling patterns of the next generation of employees,” Elkington said. “In these last two years, we’ve seen almost a double in millennial representation in both the sellers and the buyers, and their behavior is very different.” The team did an early release at Dreamforce last year and will officially launch at the upcoming summit in Utah.

InsideSales.com is well positioned in enterprise sales, as it secured a $60 million funding round in 2015, led by Salesforce Ventures, with participation from Microsoft. In addition to investing, Microsoft has also partnered with InsideSales.com on CRM and cloud technology integration. InsideSales.com now plans on creating versions of Playbooks that run on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 and integrate with the Microsoft Azure public cloud services.

The new round was led by returning investor Polaris Partners. Other returning investors included Microsoft, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Hummer Winblad, U.S. Venture Partners, Epic Ventures, and Zetta Venture Partners. QuestMark Partners and the Irish Strategic Investment Fund joined as first-time investors.

The Wall Street Journal put the company’s valuation at close to $1 billion in 2014. With this latest round bringing the total funds raised to over $250 million, the company has clearly established itself as a unicorn (even though this term has been grossly overused).

Elkington would not comment on the company’s exact valuation. In terms of next steps, VentureBeat has predicted that InsideSales.com could be a contender for an initial public offering (IPO) this year. Elkington would not comment on this either.

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Founded in 2004, InsideSales.com currently has 500 employees.