Israeli business intelligence for salespeople company Gong has completed a $250 million Series E financing round led by Franklin Templeton and with the participation of existing investors including Coatue, Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia, Thrive Capital, and Tiger Global.
This brings to $584 million the total raised by Gong, which raised $200 million last August at a company valuation of $2.2 billion. Over the past 10 months, Gong's valuation has more than tripled to $7.2 billion, which as far as is known is the highest valuation ever achieved by an Israeli startup in a financing round.
Gong has developed a system that helps sales staff and organizations identify behavior patterns and trends from data and issue insights that can raise sales, reduce customer churn, and increase market share by making decisions based on the company's interactions with customers - through organizational systems and various communications channels.
Gong was founded in 2015 by CEO Amit Bendov, and CPO Eilon Reshef. Gong serves more than 2,000 companies and has an estimated annual recurring revenue of $100 million. The company has 550 employees including 170 employees in research, development and product management in its offices in the Ramat Gan Diamond Exchange district. Gong plans to increase its Israeli work force to 300 and its worldwide work force to 1,000 by the end of 2021.
Bendov said, "Just as we predicted in 2015 when Gong began leveraging AI to understand the needs of customers, we experienced massive growth in the past year, proving revenue intelligence is a game changer for companies. As professionals across the globe were forced to connect with customers remotely for the first time, they became even more reliant on data and insights to win the hearts and minds of their customers. Gong was no longer a luxury, but a necessity, and it's become clear that our product, which makes recommendations based on reality, has the potential to change the way we all do business."
Bendov said that all the money raised today will be going into the company and that a secondary offering in which shareholders will sell some of their shares is planned for the near future.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on June 3, 2021
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