Your Source for Venture Capital and Private Equity Financings

Venture Capital News: Qualtrics Picks Up $70M

2012-05-15
PROVO, UT, Accel and Sequoia will provide a range of services and $70 million to help Qualtrics expand its SaaS product offerings beyond market research.
Qualtrics, the company that makes sophisticated research simple, today announced it has partnered with Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital in the two firms' largest-ever joint investment. Accel and Sequoia will provide a range of services and $70 million to help Qualtrics expand its SaaS product offerings beyond market research and accelerate its global growth, beginning with the hiring of another 250 employees in the next year alone.

Qualtrics has established itself as the top choice of businesses for online data collection and analysis by making it easy for anyone in a company to conduct PhD-level research. The company has been profitable since its inception and has not accepted outside funding until now.

"Today most research is still outsourced at great expense or hacked together with rudimentary tools and little coordination," said Ryan Smith, CEO and co-founder, Qualtrics. "We offer end users the do-it-yourself tools and rich analytics they need to be responsive to a fast-changing market, with the security and control IT demands."

"Data continues to proliferate through the enterprise in areas beyond the data center," said Ryan Sweeney, General Partner, Accel Partners. "As external data generated from customers, sales reps, channel partners, and employees also explodes, Qualtrics is uniquely positioned to help its customers proactively act on this information with its suite of professional-grade software products."

Customers are embracing the Qualtrics approach, resulting in triple-digit growth since 2008. The burgeoning Qualtrics client base already includes many of the world's most iconic brands in every major industry category, including:

-- Barnes & Noble, CVS/Caremark, GEICO, Microsoft, Neiman Marcus, Royal Caribbean, Southwest Airlines, Thomson Reuters, Toyota, Vodaphone and Zappos.
-- More than 50 percent of the Fortune 100 companies
-- 49 of the 50 Bloomberg Businessweek top business schools
-- Every major university in the U.S.

"Qualtrics is the biggest software company you haven't heard of yet," said Bryan Schreier, partner, Sequoia Capital. "They've become the foundation of market research and customer analytics for thousands of very happy customers."

The company's product line includes the Qualtrics Research Suite, which combines sophisticated features such as conjoint analysis, branching logic and advanced customization with an intuitive, easy-to-use interface. Organizations of all types and sizes can easily collect, analyze and act on large amounts of unstructured data without programming.

Leveraging the strengths of its research suite, Qualtrics recently released Qualtrics 360 and Qualtrics Site Intercept, expanding its SaaS product offerings beyond market research.

Qualtrics 360 is a talent assessment and leadership development platform that allows companies to evaluate and measure employees at every level in an organization. Companies can partner the Qualtrics 360 platform with any existing leadership competency or assessment-or purchase one from the Qualtrics marketplace-to deliver their own 360 evaluations, self-evaluations and performance reviews in real-time.

Qualtrics Site Intercept is an online marketing and research tool that dynamically interacts with specific website visitors. Companies can increase customer satisfaction and revenue by serving custom messages and invitations to individual visitors including surveys, ads, promotions, coupons and polls.

About Qualtrics


Qualtrics makes sophisticated research simple. The company is a worldwide leader in enterprise data collection and analysis with software that is easy enough for an intern, but sophisticated enough for a PhD. Global organizations and research firms of all types and sizes use Qualtrics software to make better decisions based on strategic research intelligence. Founded in 2002, Qualtrics has more than 4,000 enterprise customers including 600 universities worldwide, all of the top business schools, and half the Fortune 100. For more information and a free trial, visit www.qualtrics.com.

About Accel Partners


Founded in 1983, Accel Partners has a long history of partnering with outstanding entrepreneurs and management teams to build world-class businesses. Accel today invests globally using dedicated teams and market-specific strategies for local geographies, with offices in Palo Alto, California, New York City, London and Bangalore, as well as in China via its partnership with IDG-Accel. Accel has helped entrepreneurs build over 300 successful companies, many of which have defined their categories, including 99designs, Actuate, AdMob, Agile Software, Alfresco, Angry Birds (Rovio), Atlassian, BBN, Bonobos, Braintree, Brightcove, Cloudera, ComScore, Diapers.com (Quidsi), Dropbox, Etsy, Exclusively.in, Facebook, Flipkart, Fusion-IO, Gameforge, GlamMedia, Groupon, Imperva, Infinera, Interwoven, IronPlanet, JBoss, Kayak, Lookout, Macromedia, metroPCS, MoPub, Myntra, OPOWER, Polycom/PictureTel, Playfish, Portal Software, QlikTech, Rapt, Real Networks, Redback, Responsys, Riverbed, Spotify, Squarespace, SunRun, Trulia, UUNet, Veritas, Walmart.com, Webroot, Wonga, XenSource and Zimbra. For more information, please visit the Accel Partners web site at www.accel.com find us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/accel.

About Sequoia Capital


Sequoia Capital provides venture capital funding to founders of startups who want to turn business ideas into enduring companies. As the "Entrepreneurs Behind the Entrepreneurs", Sequoia Capital's Partners have worked with innovators such as Steve Jobs of Apple Computer, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Bob Swanson of Linear Technology, Sandy Lerner and Len Bozack of Cisco Systems, Dan Warmenhoven of NetApp, Jerry Yang and David Filo of Yahoo!, Jen-Hsun Huang of NVIDIA, Michael Marks of Flextronics, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen of YouTube, Dominic Orr and Keerti Melkote of Aruba Networks, Jonathan Kaplan of Pure Digital, Tony Hsieh of Zappos, Omar Hamoui of Admob and Steve Streit of Green Dot. To learn more about Sequoia Capital visit http://www.sequoiacap.com/us.
(c) by Massinvestor, Inc. For contact info, please check out our about page.
>> Click here for in-depth research on 9,000+ startups and 5,000+ VC investors