Sequoia leads $32 mn Series C round in SaaS startup Whatfix

Business-to-business (B2B) digital adoption solutions provider Whatfix has raised $32 million in a Series C round of funding led by Sequoia Capital India.

Returning investors Fidelity International backed venture capital firm Eight Roads Ventures; Cambridge, Massachusetts-based venture capital investor F-Prime Capital; and Cisco Investments participated in the round.

With this round, the software engagement solutions provider has so far raised about $50 million in private capital, according to VCCEdge data.

The capital infusion in the Quicko TechnoSoft Labs-owned and operated company comes a year after it raised $12.5 million in a Series B funding round led by Eight Roads Ventures.

The San Jose, California headquartered startup said it plans to use the fresh capital for product development and expansion into markets such as Europe and Australia.

“This latest funding will help us to expand our product offerings globally and continue to help enterprises realise the full value of their digitisation effort,” Vara Kumar, co-founder and chief technology officer at Whatfix, said in a statement.

The software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform provides in-app guidance and performance support for web applications and software products, with which it has increased employee productivity by 35%, reduced training time and costs by 60%, and increased application data accuracy by 20%, the company said. 

“Software is penetrating the deepest crevices of enterprise workflows at an unprecedented pace. Enterprise software spends is over $450 billion globally, growing 9% year-on-year. A new category of digital adoption solutions (DAS) is fast emerging to ensure user adoption keeps pace with software purchase,” Tejeshwi Sharma, principal of growth investing at Sequoia Capital India, said.

Founded in 2014 by Kumar and Khadim Batti, Whatfix has 230 employees across six global offices. It’s clientele of over 500 organisations includes US-based developer of robotic process automation software Automation Anywhere, Ireland-based consumer credit reporting company Experian, and Spain-based pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturer Grifols.

In October, it acquired Newark, Delaware based Airim, an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled personalisation engine.

India registered a 90% growth in digital adoption between 2014 and 2017, as per an index compiled by information technology (IT) and business process outsourcing (BPO) trade association body Nasscom and the Ministry of Electronics and Information and Technology last year.