Vlocity raises $60 million for cloud-based apps built on top of Salesforce
Vlocity, which develops cloud solutions built on Salesforce’s customer relationship platform (CRM), today announced that it has raised $60 million in a series C round co-led by Sutter Hill Ventures and Salesforce Ventures, with participation from new investor Bessemer Venture Partners and existing strategic investors Accenture and New York Life. This brings the San Francisco-based company’s total raised to $163 million, following two mammoth rounds of $42.8 million (series A in April 2015) and $50 million (series B in September 2016). CEO David Schmaier said the funds will be used to “accelerate” and “deepen” product development in Vlocity’s suite of apps available through Salesforce’s AppExchange.
“I am delighted by the incredible success that our customers are realizing in digital transformations when adopting our modern industry cloud and mobile applications,” Schmaier said. “Their operational and financial benefits are exceeding expectations, proving that the best customer experiences are industry-specific and that the industry cloud enables unprecedented business agility and faster time to value.”
Vlocity was founded in 2014 by Schmaier, Craig Ramsey, James Ramsey, Mark Armenante, and Young Sohn, who’ve between them held roles at Oracle, Siebel Systems, NetSuite, and Salesforce Vertical on Demand spinout company Veeva Systems. Rather than take a broad-based approach to the soon-to-be $29.7 billion worldwide CRM market, the startup has wisely chosen to target a handful of lucrative verticals, like communications and media, insurance and financial services, health, energy and utilities, and government and nonprofit — a go-to-market strategy that has netted customers like MetLife, Telefort, WellCare, British Gas, Cox Automotive, Rogers, T-Mobile, Sky, Telus, Farmers Insurance, Telia, Cigna, Allstate, Liberty Mutual, and Claro, among dozens of others.
Vlocity’s platform comprises OmniScript, a collection of over 40 preconfigured script elements and dynamic, templated business forms configurable with a drag-and-drop visual design tool. Also on tap: Industry Console, which supports up to “dozens” of guided flows showing customer history, service-to-sales opportunities, and data sources in a single card-based flow, and DataRaptor, which handles external data integration, extraction, and transformation with declarative object-to-object maps, bulk transaction support, and more.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Vlocity’s process engine presents personalized offers and products ordered by rates and fees and filtered by customizable rules, while Vlocity Mobile and Vlocity Wear — Vlocity’s smartphone and Apple Watch clients, respectively — surface chronologies of customer interactions and sport enhanced tagging and on-the-fly profile editing tools. Last, but not least, there’s clickstream analytics, a Salesforce Wave Analytics-powered dashboard that identifies trends at a “process level,” with the goal of increased upselling, improved customer satisfaction, and reduced average handle time.
“Vlocity is a perfect example of the incredible innovation occurring in the Salesforce ecosystem and how we are working together to provide customers in all industries the technologies they need to attract and serve customers in smarter ways,” said Salesforce Industries’ executive vice president and general manager Jujhar Singh of today’s news. “Vlocity continues to demonstrate the significant gains customers can achieve from deep, industry-specific capabilities, delivered in concert with Salesforce’s world-leading CRM platform and industry products.”
Vlocity, which says it has more than 600 employees in 20 countries, unsurprisingly maintains a cozy relationship with Salesforce. The sales giant led Vlocity’s previous rounds, and two of Vlocity’s board members were previously Salesforce directors.
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