Israeli work and team management platform company Monday.com announced today that it has raised $150 million in its second financing round within a year, at a company value of $1.9 billion, almost quadruple the $550 million company value in its first financing round.
Monday.com, which is developing a platform for team management in enterprises, has raised $234 million to date. Almost the entire amount raised will be put into the company treasury, with a small amount used to buy shares from Monday.com's founders and employees.
Sapphire Ventures, located in Silicon Valley, led the new round, with participation from Hamilton Lane, HarbourVest Partners, ION Crossover Partners and Vintage Investment Partners. Monday.com previously emphasized that it had only two types of shares, for investors and employees, and that there were no preferred shares for investors in later financing rounds.
Monday.com, founded in 2012 by Eran Zinman and Roy Mann, has 260 employees and offices in Tel Aviv and New York. The money raised will expand the company's operations, and be used to hire more staff, and for current expenses, while Monday.com uses its revenue for marketing and sales expenses. The company said that its annual recurring revenue (ARR) was $84 million, and that its revenue had tripled in the past year.
Monday.com has developed a system that enables users to manage all aspects of their work: annual strategic planning, current tasks, working with customers, etc. The system contains many work formats suitable for different enterprises and different employees within the same enterprise. The company also emphasizes flexibility for users.
Monday.com says that its more than 80,000 customers include Carlsberg, Discovery Channel, Glossier, Hulu, Phillips, WeWork, and Zippo, and hundreds of Fortune 500 companies. The company recruits its customers through a number of their employees in a specific team, not through their CEO or VP development. The employees begin using the product, and its use then expands within the enterprise.
"We started without any sales team," Zinman says, "but we later added salespeople, who don't operate in the usual way. Our leads are paying customers, and you just try to help them grow. What happens is that the teams using the system grow to 50 people, but we discovered that in order to progress further, someone has to take the company in hand. So we have a team that helps the company develop and presents it with possible uses."
"We want an IPO at a time suitable for us"
High-tech companies have been remaining private companies longer in recent years, achieving a high value even before their IPOs. The trend includes Israel. There are a number of companies that have reached a value of over $1 billion already at the private capital stage. Lemonade, eToro, and ironSource are three such companies. Monday.com says that it wants to remain an independent company, not to be sold, and an IPO is definitely a stage in this process. In the offerings market in the past year, the more successful ones were by companies such as Slack Technologies and Zoom Video Communications, which developed enterprise software, so Monday.com is optimistic.
"I think that the current financing round is designed to enable us to hold an IPO at a time we think is right. It will happen, but the timing is important. Companies are staying private longer because the opportunities are greater - they are become global and growing more swiftly. We're getting very close to the point at which we'll be ready in terms of our ability to optimally predict our activity. We're aiming at over $100 million in revenue. I feel that we have a company with room for growth. We're at the beginning, and we're not in a hurry," Mann says.
"Monday.com is revolutionizing the workplace software market and we're delighted to be partnering with Roy, Eran, and the rest of the Monday.com team in their mission to transform the way people work," said Sapphire Ventures managing partner Rajeev Dham. "Monday.com delivers the quality and ease of use typically reserved for consumer products to the enterprise, which we think unlocks significant value for workers and organizations alike."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on July 30, 2019
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