Clarabridge Secures $80M in New Funding to Drive Next Phase of Customer Experience Management

Financing to Fuel Continued Product Innovation and Global Expansion Following Multiple Years of Explosive Growth

Reston, VA--Clarabridge, Inc., the leading provider of intelligent Customer Experience Management (CEM) solutions for the world’s top brands, today announced the completion of an $80 million equity investment by new investors General Catalyst Partners, Summit Partners, and Unica-founder Yuchun Lee. Clarabridge will use the investment to further expand its global operations, power continued product innovation, grow its employee base and increase reach through marketing and strategic transactions to capitalize on escalating market demand for CEM solutions.

Founded in 2006, Clarabridge has built the market leading CEM solution powered by sentiment and text analytics for Global 1000 organizations including Walmart, Dell, Fidelity, Wendy’s International, United Airlines, Best Buy, PetSmart, QVC, Inc., and many more. The investment follows a three year period in which Clarabridge recorded over 150% revenue growth, over 250% growth in recurring revenues, more than doubling its team, and global expansion with new offices in London and San Francisco.

“The world’s top companies recognize the growing importance, ROI and massive amount of data growth and channels involved in listening to the voice of the customer. We’re thrilled at how many have selected Clarabridge’s multichannel, Intelligent Customer Experience solutions to collect, analyze and act on this critical data to enhance customer experience,” said Sid Banerjee, Clarabridge CEO. “Over the past eight years, Clarabridge has clearly established itself as the leader in the CEM space. This capital infusion will enable us to significantly increase investment in our people, products and processes, accelerate innovation, both organically and strategically, and ensure we power the future of customer experience analytics at all levels of the enterprise.”

As part of the transaction, Yuchun Lee will join as Clarabridge’s Chairman of the Board and Larry Bohn of General Catalyst Partners and Tom Jennings of Summit Partners will join as board directors. Sid Banerjee will continue on as CEO, building on eight years of proven leadership as founder and CEO. “Our new investors bring decades of experience building, growing, and leading world-class companies and I look forward to working with them to scale Clarabridge to new levels of success,” said Banerjee.

“Before committing to our investment in Clarabridge,” added Lee, “we researched the CEM space thoroughly. While there are many exciting, growing companies developing compelling solutions in the space, we found that Clarabridge uniquely possesses a strong team, a robust, scalable product architecture, and proven, successful execution since its inception – and we believe Clarabridge will become the dominant leader as CEM continues to undergo explosive growth in the next few years.”

ArchPoint Partners served as exclusive financial advisor to Clarabridge in this transaction.

About Clarabridge
Clarabridge is the leading provider of Customer Experience Management (CEM) powered through intelligent sentiment and text analytics. Clarabridge enables Global 1000 enterprises to achieve a universal understanding of their customers by automatically collecting, classifying, scoring sentiment and analyzing qualitative data found in Voice-of-the-Customer (VoC) feedback channels. Insights extracted result in improved marketing, product/service offerings, operations, and customer service across an organization. Clarabridge customers include B/E Aerospace, Charming Shoppes, Inc., Choice Hotels, Dell, E.ON, Expedia, Fidelity, Gaylord Hotels, Intuit, J.D. Power, L’Oréal, Marriott International, PetSmart, QVC, Inc., Sage North America, United Airlines, Walmart, Walgreens, and Wendy’s International. Clarabridge is privately held with offices in Reston, VA., San Francisco, CA. and London, U.K. For more information, visit http://www.clarabridge.com.

Twitter: @Clarabridge | Blog: Clarabridge Blog | Facebook: Clarabridge Page

About General Catalyst Partners
General Catalyst Partners is a venture capital firm that makes early stage and growth equity investments. General Catalyst Partners invests in exceptional entrepreneurs who are building the technology-based companies that will lead innovation and transform industries. Founded in 2000, General Catalyst Partners leverages its principals' extensive operational, business development and technological expertise to provide portfolio companies with a catalyst for success through business-building and partnership development assistance. General Catalyst has offices in Cambridge, MA, Palo Alto, CA and New York City. For more information, visit: http://www.generalcatalyst.com or https://twitter.com/gcvp.

About Summit Partners
Founded in 1984, Summit Partners is a growth equity firm that has raised nearly $15 billion in capital, and provides equity and credit for growth, recapitalizations, and management buyouts. Summit has invested in more than 380 companies in technology, healthcare and other growth sectors. These companies have completed more than 130 public offerings, and more than 135 have been acquired through strategic mergers and sales. Summit maintains offices in North America, Europe and Asia and invests in companies around the world. For more information, please visit http://www.summitpartners.com or https://twitter.com/summit_partners.

About Yuchun Lee
Yuchun Lee is widely recognized as an accomplished entrepreneur and global thought leader in the area of information technologies. Mr. Lee was most recently Vice President and General Manager of Enterprise Marketing Management business unit at IBM and a key architect in IBM's global initiative to serve the needs of Chief Marketing Officers. Prior to IBM, Mr. Lee served as chief executive officer of Unica, a NASDAQ listed software company he co-founded to meet marketers’ technology needs, growing to over $125M in revenue before merging with IBM in 2010. Prior to Unica, he held senior positions with Digital Equipment Corporation, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory and the MIT Media Labs. Mr. Lee holds Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT and an MBA from Babson College. He is currently an executive in residence at General Catalyst Partners, an executive advisor at Summit Partners, and on the board of Vertex Pharmaceutical (NASDAQ: VRTX).

In the United States of America, Summit Partners operates as an SEC-registered investment advisor. In the United Kingdom, this document is issued by Summit Partners Limited, a firm authorized and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Summit Partners Limited is a limited company registered in England and Wales with company number 4141197, and its registered office is at 20–22 Bedford Row, London, WC1R 4JS, UK. This document is intended solely to provide information regarding Summit Partners’ potential financing capabilities for prospective portfolio companies.