Less than 10 months after raising $46 million Series B, CaptivateIQ announced today that it has raised $100 million in a Series C round at a valuation of $1.25 billion.
The San Francisco-based startup, which has developed a no-code SaaS platform to help companies create bespoke sales commission plans, says it has “more than tripled” its revenue year-over-year, though it has refused to provide hard sales numbers.
A trio of companies co-led CaptivateIQ’s recent investment, including ICONIQ Growth and existing backers Sequoia and Accel. Sapphire Ventures also joined the funding as a new investor, bringing the company’s total funding raised to date to $164.6 million.
CaptivateIQ’s customer base includes “hundreds of organizations across industries and continents,” including more than a quarter of the Forbes Cloud 100, as well as Affirm, Amplitude, ClassPass and Podium.
Launched in Winter 2017, CaptivateIQ hails from the Winter 2018 batch of Y Combinator. In short, CaptivateIQ is part of a new wave of Incentive Compensation Management (ICM) solutions that have emerged in recent years to help businesses automate the “complex” task of designing, processing, and reporting commissions and to improve, according to Mark Schopmeyer. Co-Founder and Co-CEO.
“Distribution commission represents the largest go-to-market investment for most B2B companies, making commissions a mission-critical process for companies,” he said. “However, managing commissions is difficult, and companies have been forced to choose between two sub-optimal options for the process – manual, opaque and error-prone spreadsheets, or rigid and costly legacy solutions.”
These legacy solutions, Schopmeyer says, can only handle certain types of commission plans and require users to learn “obscure” programming languages.
“Plus, they’re often prohibitively expensive, with implementation fees running into the six figures,” he said.
Photo credit: CaptivateIQ
In his view, CaptivateIQ alleviates these problems by taking the flexibility of spreadsheets and combining it with the scalability and power of software technology to configure commission plans with minimal support.
“Calculating commissions is really complicated and business critical — think of it like a very complicated form of payroll — every company has a unique commission plan that involves a lot more calculations and data than your typical payroll math,” Co-CEO Conway Teng said me at the time of the company’s last raise. “Also, in recent years, companies have access to more data than ever before, giving them room to engage employees on more KPIs.”
The company is currently in growth mode and is focused on investing in the product, research and development, and “building a great team,” Schopmeyer said.
Speaking of which, CaptivateIQ has more than 200 employees, up from around 90 at the time of Series B in April 2021.
For his part, ICONIQ Growth General Partner Doug Pepper believes the market opportunity in sales commissions is “enormous.”
“Unlike spreadsheets and legacy solutions, CaptivateIQ is extremely powerful and flexible, able to adapt to different compensation plans and sales organizations as those organizations grow,” he wrote via email. “At the same time, the product strategically retains familiar spreadsheet functions, making the platform extremely intuitive for users to use.”
No-code has a moment. Last week, Walnut, a company that creates sales and marketing demo experiences, announced a $35 million in Series B funding. And Softr, a Berlin-based startup that recently allows customers to build apps on top of airtable databases raised $13.5 million in a Series A round.
