“The greatest founders of all-time have been maniacal about the customer experience, and that’s why those companies — Walmart, Apple, and Amazon — disrupted their respective industries, ran laps around their competitors, and have delivered incredible results year after year,” said Drift CEO and co-founder David Cancel in a blog post today, announcing Drift’s $60 million Series C round.
Cancel expects Drift to stand among the greatest technology companies of all time by transforming the B2B buying process — and it seems that the four-year-old startup is well-poised to do so.
According to Cancel, Drift’s revenue is up more than 10x compared to the first quarter of 2017, and the company is growing faster than B2B unicorns like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday and Zendesk were at the same stage.
“It all started with the decision to get rid of our lead forms: over half of our pipeline is created thanks to a real-time conversation on our website, and our sales cycle is about two weeks long, which is unprecedented in the B2B space,” Cancel said.
What sets Drift apart from its competitors is that it offers a buying platform built for the customer, rather than another selling platform built for the company, Cancel said. To this end, Drift employs a conversational chatbot that can inform customers and book demos at any time — whether someone from Drift is on the other end or not.
“Putting Drift on your website became like taking your best salesperson and having them greet everyone that came into your store (and they never got sick or took a vacation),” Cancel said.
Currently there are more than 100,000 businesses around the world using Drift, including companies like AdRoll, Cornerstone OnDemand, Dyn, InVision, Vidyard and Zuora.
The latest round, which was led by Sequoia Capital, comes on the heels of Drift’s $32 million Series B financing, which occurred just seven months earlier.
Cancel says they “haven’t touched that money yet,” but said they decided to do this round because they want to build a “pillar company,” and they know how much money that will take.
Drift currently employs 130 people in Boston and is actively hiring across all roles.
