With over 25 years of experience investing and advising 400+ software companies, our team is on the pulse of industry trends and understands what it takes to build a successful business. At the end of every month, our insights and updates are summarized by Hilary Gosher, Managing Director of Insight Partners. We encourage you to explore and subscribe!
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APRIL 2021
MAY 2021
MARCH 2021
FEBRUARY 2021
JANUARY 2021
An Initial Public Offering (IPO) is a momentous milestone. It is the end of one era as a ScaleUp company, and the beginning of the next phase of the growth journey. 2021 has been a record-breaking year for public debuts of Insight Partners' portfolio companies – and it’s only June. This month, four portfolio companies achieved public listings: monday.com, 1stDibs, WalkMe, and SentinelOne. They join DarkTrace who achieved the milestone in April. Congratulations to the founders, CEOs, executive teams, leaders and employees in all of these companies! Insight is proud to support you both pre- and post-IPO. We know you’ll accomplish even more with your public currency. In this newsletter we showcase the 50+ Insight companies in our portfolio who have IPO’d and review lessons learned en route to this milestone. We also profile JumpStart, a program to support ScaleUps in hiring diverse talent.
JUNE 2021
SCALEUP REPORT
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Remote selling is here to stay. Hybrid conferences will persist. DE&I programs are afoot in earnest. Productivity tools are widespread. It’s a truism that 2020 upended things…and some of the change is good. Last year was a slingshot forward for change that was already in the making, like digital-first global corporations and flexible work policies. We discuss this in “From Trend to Tactic: What’s Here to Stay from 2020”. January has been business as usual: developing the funnel to achieve lofty goals and hiring for growth. Our featured posts are helpful reminders of two things to do: align sales and marketing, and build in operational capability to scale efficiently, especially in product. It’s astonishing, but January has come and gone in a flash, and there is still so much to accomplish.
Field Notes Newsletter
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
HEADLINES
NEW INVESTMENTS
We asked Insight leaders to share what they believe is the new normal in areas that impact ScaleUps.
From Trend to Tactic: What's Here to Stay From 2020
For demand generation to be effective, Sales and Marketing need to be a coordinated team with a shared set of core principles.
Funnel Health is a 4-Step Team Sport
Learn why product operations is the heartbeat enabling product teams to scale.
Why ScaleUps Need Product Operations
Groundspeed Analytics is a leading provider of SaaS-delivered submission and placement technology to the commercial P&C industry.
Jellyfish is the pioneer Engineering Management Platform that enables engineering leaders to align engineering work with strategic business objectives.
Gtmhub helps companies align strategy and execution by providing the world's only OKRs management platform.
Run:AI helps companies execute on their AI initiatives quickly, while keeping budgets under control.
iLobby is a leader in visitor management that tracks, manages, and monitors who is in their building.
SetSail wants to upend the way sales people get compensated by paying them throughout the sales cycle, rather than a single commission after the sale closes.
Jedox builds tools to help companies with their financial planning and analysis using data sourced from basic documents like Excel spreadsheets.
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Hilary Gosher
Managing Director at Insight Partners
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GrowthCap: Insight Partners on "Top 25 Growth Equity Firms of 2020" List
Fast Company: Fast Growing Companies are the True Powerhouse of the US Economy
WSJ: In Their Own Words With Insight Partners’ Cian Cotter
ScaleUp companies are the future. Where startups are an engine for innovation (but fail at alarming rates), ScaleUps are an engine of economic growth (demonstrating resilience in downturns, adding jobs in both good and bad times). Whereas starting up is fraught with product and market risk, scaling up is fraught with execution risk. To quantify the unique challenges of ScaleUps and understand their economic impact, Insight commissioned a report from Wakefield Research. We found that 85% of scaling focused companies expect growth rates to increase in the next 3 years and some 42% of executives say that scaling their business is more difficult than the startup phase. Leaders noted that attracting investors is their biggest obstacle (50%), and they want an investment partner that provides strategic resources across functional business areas (64%). Our thesis is clear: Insight Partners invests in ScaleUps because they are a more predictable force-multiplier of economic growth. Even so, their unique expansion challenges require support to mitigate execution risk – this is something our Onsite team excels at. What do you have in common with other ScaleUps? Download the report and the data and take our quiz to see.
RESEARCH REPORT
To better understand the role of ScaleUps and their impact on today’s economy, we commissioned Wakefield Research to conduct a multi-phase research report. Explore this research; see where your company is on the ScaleUp journey by taking our quiz.
The ScaleUp Revolution: A Force Multiplier of Economic Growth
Alma is on a mission to simplify access to high quality, affordable mental health care by supporting mental health care providers in building thriving private practices.
Plume is the creator of the world's first SaaS experience platform for Communications Service Providers (CSPs) and their subscribers deployed globally.
Class Technologies created Class, a software that integrates teaching and learning tools with Zoom.
RapidSOS has created the world's first emergency response data platform that securely links life-saving data from 350M+ connected devices to emergency services and first responders.
Earnix is a leading provider of mission-critical systems for global insurers and banks.
Theator is pioneering the Surgical Intelligence revolution, with an innovative platform built for surgeons by surgeons to address the variability and disparity in surgical care.
Eden Health is a nationally recognized medical practice that makes it easier for HR teams to get their employees great medical care.
Weights & Biases helps Machine Learning teams track their models, datasets and experiments and is used and loved by over 70,000 practitioners.
Crunchbase: Insight Partners Shares Advice On Scaling Startups During A Pandemic
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MAKING HEADLINES
Saks CEO on Spinoff: Online Luxury Market Will Triple
WeWork to Become Publicly Traded Via SPAC Merger
Insight VP Named Forbes Israel's 30 Under 30
For U.S. companies, answering the question of when and how offices will re-open is imminent given the pace of vaccine roll-out. A recent survey of large tech companies shows Silicon Valley workers trickling back, some offices opening in the summer, with the majority open for business by September. It also highlights that workers appreciate aspects of working from home, and would like this flexibility to continue. In our daily interactions with software executives, there is a strong belief that this is a pivotal juncture in “the future of office work.” Habits have been formed, work-life balance expectations have shifted. As we emerge from the pandemic, we’re faced with decisions that will profoundly impact the way we do business going forward. What’s clear is that employers and employees alike want agency in these decisions, after a year where the coronavirus has largely called the shots. To take the pulse of Insight’s ScaleUp community on these topics, we’ve launched a survey and will share the results with all respondents. Whether you’re headquartered in the U.S. or outside, your answers will provide a yardstick to support decision-making.
Complete this survey to contribute to and learn about return to work policy changes in ScaleUp companies.
Future of Work Survey
It’s time to get serious about closing the value gaps along your customer and user journeys. Follow this 10-step process to conduct your next customer value gap analysis.
Mind the Value Gap: Why Companies Fail to Scale Customer Success
To avoid hiring mistakes, we've outlined common issues that we see based on the hundreds of CRO/SVP/VP Sales interviews that our team has engaged with.
Hiring a Sales Leader: 5 Common Pitfalls to Avoid
Camunda is an open source software company innovating process automation with a developer-friendly approach that is standards-based, highly scalable and collaborative for business and IT.
Clarify Health is a technology company whose enterprise analytics cloud transforms healthcare data into actionable insights for providers, health plans, and life sciences companies.
Corvus Insurance is the leading provider of commercial insurance products built on advanced data science, with an AI-driven approach to empowering brokers and policyholders to better predict and prevent loss.
Fridge No More is a 15-minute grocery delivery service. With free instant delivery, no minimum order and supermarket prices, large weekly grocery hauls become a relic of the past.
iFoodDS offers a comprehensive food supply chain platform for safety, traceability and quality management.
Incredibuild turbocharges development with our Virtualized Distributed Processing™ technology that turns every host into a supercomputer with hundreds of cores.
Overwolf is the all-in-one platform that enables creators to build, distribute, and monetize in-game apps and mods.
PayScale is the only technology solution for managing compensation that provides multiple streams of fresh, transparently curated, and validated salary data.
Pollinate works with leading banks around the world, offering a modern, cloud-based toolkit for SMEs.
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Privacera SaaS-based data security and governance platform enables analytics teams to access data without compromising compliance with regulations.
Saks Fifth Avenue is a leading shopping destination for the all-channel luxury experience.
Viz.ai is the leader in AI-driven modern care coordination.
9 Portfolio Companies Named "50 Most Promising Israeli Startups in 2021" by Calcalist
5 Portfolio Companies on CB Insight's "AI 100" Annual List
Insight Advisor & Former White House Official Argues for Loosening Technology Modernization Fund Repayment Requirements
Everyone is busy. Long hours, surging tech markets, rising demand for software, along with an opportunity to capitalize on a strong fund-raising environment. In short, there’s a lot going on. Given this, we hope to support you through sharing data and best practices. In this month’s newsletter we release the results of our "Return to Office" survey: 65% of companies will be back in the office by the Autumn/Fall although back-to-office has changed. ~20% of companies are choosing a remote-first work policy and ~50% will have hybrid policies. Alongside managing this transition, companies are navigating, among others, the future of hybrid events, scaling finance, diverse workplace goals, and employee burnout. Our articles this month touch on all of these topics. Amidst the mayhem, we feel fortunate to be in a growth industry, working with innovative and nimble companies. We are here to serve and help. Reach out if we can support you.
Insight conducted a survey to understand when and how tech executives are thinking about employees returning to the office. Explore the results in this report!
Return to Office Survey Report
We partnered with hybrid-sofware event leader, Bizzabo, on this downloadable guide to help companies drive meaningful attendee engagement in the evolving event landscape.
The ScaleUp Guide to Post-COVID Era Events
Two Insight portfolio companies, FloQast and E2open, discuss how ScaleUps can prepare for exit through a SPAC, IPO, or M&A.
Successfully Scaling a Finance Department for Exit
Automox is the easiest-to-use, most-recommended, and most efficient cloud-native solution for endpoint management.
Pathlight is a Realtime Performance Management (RPM) platform that allows large, customer-facing teams to move faster than ever before.
Connecteam is a deskless workforce management app providing an all-in-one experience for communication, engagement operations and training.
Seeq publishes software applications for manufacturing organizations to rapidly find and share data insights.
Materials Zone is an innovative materials informatics company.
Splitwise is the easiest way to split costs with friends and family and is on a mission to evaporate awkward conversations about money.
Octopus Deploy has enabled thousands of companies to automate software deployments and complete their Continuous Delivery pipeline.
TetraScience is the R&D Data Cloud company with a mission to transform life sciences R&D, accelerate discovery, and improve and extend human life.
ZenGo's mobile wallet, available on iOS and Android, offers retail investors the safest, easiest way to buy, sell, trade, and earn over 50 crypto currencies and counting.
COVID-19
FINANCE
In Your Shoes CEO Series – Krish Sastry on Becoming President & CEO of Appris
In our CEO series, we highlight Krish Sastry’s leadership approach amidst political demonstrations and economic tensions.
Insight Partners Amasses $1.56 Billion for Preferred Equity Deals
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Insight MD on GrowthCap's "The Top 25 Healthcare Investors of 2021"
5 Top VCs Reveal Favorite Cybersecurity Portfolio Companies
Insight MD on 20VC Discusses Funding Mania
In a recent tally, nearly 100 Insight investments are companies with some form of Product-Led Growth (PLG) go-to-market strategy. A compelling product that’s easy to download and adopt, freemium offerings, a vibrant community of advocates – these are some of the components for a successful PLG approach. We’re inured to sales-led selling – a world in which sales teams “own” the number. In PLG, product, marketing, sales, and customer success teams work closely to ensure customer delight, conversion, adoption, and retention. PLG utilizes a bottom-up, product-first, and community-based approach to create the most sustainable and (eventually) profitable customer relationships. Although a PLG selling motion takes time, effort, and investment, it can supercharge your company growth and significantly improve core company metrics like sales and marketing efficiency, and net dollar retention. Read our playbooks to understand if this is right for you. Contact our experts at plg@insightpartners.com.
Learn the basics of PLG and how it can help companies improve their customer acquisition, expansion, and retention.
Product-Led Growth: The New Paradigm in Software Selling
Let's get to the truth! In this blog, we dispel three common myths about PLG.
Mythbusters: Common Product Led Growth Misconceptions That Can Hold You Back
Take this interactive quiz to understand if you should adopt a product or sales led strategy.
Quiz: Is Product Led Growth Right For Your Business?
Atlan is a modern data collaboration workspace (like Github for engineering or Figma for design).
Explorium provides the first External Data Platform to improve Analytics and Machine Learning.
Altruist is a Los Angeles-based company on a mission to make financial advisors more efficient, more affordable, and accessible to more people.
Florence is a global leader in remote connectivity and electronic document workflow management for clinical trials.
CivicPlus delivers technology solutions that enable local governments to optimize the experience they deliver when interacting with citizens.
Lightrun is transforming the developer experience, bringing a developer-native observability platform.
Cycode secures DevOps pipelines and provides full visibility into enterprise development infrastructure.
parcelLab is the leading Operations Experience Management platform globally.
Thunes is a B2B company that powers payments for the world's fastest-growing businesses.
What You Need to Know About Summer Internships This Year
SafetyCulture is the operational heartbeat of working teams around the world.
Stampli is a complete AP automation platform that brings together accounts payable communications, documentation, and payments in one place.
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Hilary Goher
Explore this interactive infographic that pays homage to the portfolio companies that have gone public during our 26 years of software investing.
Celebrating 50+ IPO's
Anjuna effortlessly enables enterprises to safely run even their most sensitive workloads in the public cloud.
Bringg helps enterprises scale up and optimize their logistics operations with the leading data-led delivery and fulfillment cloud platform.
Apna is India's largest professional networking platform dedicated to helping India's burgeoning working class.
Brinqa is leading the charge for a new wave of knowledge-driven, risk-based cybersecurity solutions.
CommerceIQ leverages machine learning, analytics and automations to optimize the e-commerce channel across supply chain, marketing and sales operations functions.
Fiddler mission is to enable businesses of all sizes to unlock the AI black box and deliver trustworthy AI experiences for their customers.
Immersive Labs is empowering organizations to equip, exercise, and evidence human cyber capabilities.
Lansweeper is an IT asset management software provider helping businesses better understand, manage and protect their IT devices and network.
LeoLabs provides access to critical mapping and space situational awareness (SSA) data for low Earth orbit.
Watch this discussion with the former CMOs of Atlassian and Box about lessons learned from delivering successful IPOs.
Since our initial investment in 2016, Insight is proud to have helped WalkMe create a category and ramp up customer growth before going public.
Be in the Room Where it Happens: The CMO’s Role in IPO
ScaleUp Milestone Series: WalkMe's IPO
SCALEUP MILESTONE
ScaleUp Milestone Series: monday.com's IPO
Since our first investment in 2017, Insight partnered with the team through a rebrand, building a channel partner program, and scaling sales.
Getting Ready for an IPO Can Start Today Even if You Don’t Go Public for Years To Come
Learn what type of business is a good IPO candidate and review a checklist to prepare for an IPO in this article.
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CNBC: Israel Bet Banks Billions for Insight as monday.com and WalkMe Go Public
Forbes: Insight Partners Invests $15M Into Minority-Led Early Stage Firms
Cision: Insight Partners Launches JumpStart Program to Expand CS & Sales Careers
TC: 4 Proven Approaches to CX Strategy That Make Customers Feel Loved
PlanetScale is modernizing the database industry. Its database platform offers a true serverless experience.
Rasgo is the operational heartbeat of working teams around the world.
Saks OFF 5th is a department store chain founded in 1990, and a subsidiary of the luxury department store chain Saks Fifth Avenues.
Transmit Security is on a mission to transform the identity experience market by ushering in a new era of passwordless authentication.
We have reached the end of a marathon year, one that has simultaneously felt like 12 month-long sprints. Against initial odds, the pace of growth for software companies has not slowed down. In 2020, Insight invested in a record 55 companies in the ScaleUp phase – those companies who are rapidly growing customers, revenue, product and team. To wit: in Q3, approximately 50% of companies in Insight’s portfolio grew revenue more than 50% Y-o-Y, with 30% growing >75%. In addition, companies achieved remarkable milestones including IPOs, multiple M&A combinations, scaling teams past 500 people, customers numbering in the thousands, and high net retention. To round out the year, Insight Parters surveyed the CFOs from our portfolio to create a benchmark report that would help software ScaleUp companies manage their operations and understand what vendors their peers are using. Explore this infographic to learn key findings.
DECEMBER 2020
Every year, Insight Partners surveys the CFOs of our portfolio companies to build a report on ScaleUp software trends. We have summarized key findings in an infographic and full report.
The State of Software: 2020 CFO Survey
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The adage that hindsight is 2020 is eerily apt right now, especially as it relates to the first half of this year. We’ve adapted to the next normal, and have a better understanding of how to operate in it, although a little foresight for how it will evolve would be welcome. In the absence of this, we can plan. This month, Onsite’s Sales Center of Excellence focuses on plans and tactics within the control of ScaleUp sales leaders: short-term incentives, compensation plans, managing to conversion metrics, and pricing models. In spite of uncertainty, ScaleUp companies are still winning. nCino’s successful IPO this month proves the power of software’s resilience coupled with world-class execution. A big shoutout to the nCino team – it’s great to have a reason to celebrate in these times.
JULY 2020
Explore this interactive infographic to identify what levers to pull to drive growth in the latter part of the year.
CRO Insights on How Companies are Motivating Teams in 2H20
Hit your number quarter after quarter by doing the right math using Insight's reverse funnel template.
Reverse Funnel Math: The Science of Hitting Your Number
Through the lens of two case studies, we look at why pricing model design is central to revenue model success.
Your Pricing Model is Key to Future Success: Lessons from Moviepass and Atlassian
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Tips for Effective Virtual Engagements and Negotiations
The selling process is now more complex, so we gathered a variety of tips on how to negotiate in a virtual sales environment to win deals.
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TACTICS
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NOVEMBER 2020
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To take the pulse of Insight’s ScaleUp community on these topics, we’ve launched a survey and will share the results with all respondents. Whether you’re headquartered in the U.S. or outside, your answers will provide a yardstick to support decision-making.
POWER OF SFOTWARE
Complete this survey to contribute to, and learn about return to work policy changes in ScaleUp companies.
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In our daily interactions with software executives, there is a strong belief that this is a pivotal juncture in “the future of office work.” Habits have been formed, work-life balance expectations have shifted. As we emerge from the pandemic, we’re faced with decisions that will profoundly impact the way we do business going forward. What’s clear is that employers and employees alike want agency in these decisions, after a year where the coronavirus has largely called the shots. To take the pulse of Insight’s ScaleUp community on these topics, we’ve launched a survey and will share the results with all respondents. Whether you’re headquartered in the U.S. or outside, your answers will provide a yardstick to support decision-making.