Outreach

Investment Idea Details

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About the company

Outreach enables companies to dramatically increase revenue by helping sales reps and leaders increase their productivity. The company uses AI and the world's largest customer interactions database. Outreach automates contacts by email, voice, and social media.

Unlike traditional CRM systems, Outreach is more than just a customer database – the platform allows you to translate data into marketing strategies. It helps a sales team take the right targeted actions that bring a customer to a purchase.

According to Forrester’s study, Outreach pushed sales productivity up by 11%. Moreover, the company delivers a 5x return on investment, and businesses break even on cost in less than 3 months.

Outreach is the world’s top sales engagement platform with the largest customer base and industry-leading usage. More than 4,800 companies such as Adobe, Tableau, Splunk, DocuSign, and SAP depend on Outreach's products. Outreach is the only sales engagement and intelligence platform to make the Forbes Cloud 100 three times in a row, and also be the 58th fastest-growing vendor in the category on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500.

Over the past year, Outreach has increased to more than 800 employees worldwide, and added two new global offices in London and Prague to its U.S. locations in Seattle and San Francisco.

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Risks

The CRM market is highly competitive. Both major players and new companies are seeking to diversify their offer beyond the usual functionality, such as the storage of customer information.

Traditional players such as Salesforce, Zendesk, ZohoCRM offer more and more tools for marketing campaign analytics, email automation, etc. At the same time, they have more resources for development than smaller players.

Outreach and its competitors (SalesLoft, Groove, Gong) are still in the early stages of development. Despite the recognition of the software as the key to the efficient functioning of the sales department, the market is still small.

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Market Opportunities

The CRM market size was valued at $42 billion in 2019 and is projected to reach $96 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 11.1% from 2020 to 2027.

At the same time, the segment of the sales engagement software in which Outreach operates is considered to be one of the most dynamic and fast-growing in sales technology. In 2017, it was valued at $1.6 billion and is projected to reach nearly $6 billion by 2023. 92% of sales development organizations rank sales engagement platforms as critical to their team’s success.

Outreach’s important advantage has to do with many tech integrations with traditional CRM systems such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, SugarCRM, and with email services, various analytics systems, voice services, etc. This allows companies to adapt Outreach for operations with ease, without changing their customary services.

Outreach evolves and releases new products. In 2020, at the Annual Outreach Unleash event, the company announced three innovative solutions: Kaia — a real-time conversation intelligence tool. This is the most innovative technology in the sales optimization software market; Outreach Insights — a new AI reporting suite featuring a breakthrough technology that analyzes buyer emotive signals and sentiment; Outreach Success Plan — a system that allows buyers and sellers to collaborate, creating more transparency around the status of the deal which improves forecasting for sales leaders and teams.

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Financials and Valuation

Outreach was founded in 2014. The company raised almost $500 million in 10 investment rounds. A series G round took place in May 2021. The stock was valued at $29.27 and the company's total valuation was raised to $4.4 billion, three times more than in Series F, the previous round a year ago. The company's stock is currently valued at $33.68 in the secondary market, approximating a valuation of $5 billion.

Salesforce Ventures, Steadfast Capital Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global Management, Lone Pine Capital, Sands Capital, Mayfield Fund, DFJ Growth, Trinity Ventures, and others have invested in the company.

According to Outreach CEO Manny Medina, its business is now revving up, especially as the pandemic shifted more sales processes to digital formats. Its annual recurring revenue hit $100 million in the fall of 2020. Moreover, the company's ARR grew by more than 100% year-over-year in Q1 2021.

Outreach didn’t specify timing for an initial public offering but said one could be in its future as an important event in the company’s cycle. A similar public company ZoomInfo (ZI) that became public in the fall of 2020 trades with the P/S 42x multiplier.

We expect the annual revenue of the company to be 250-300 million when it goes public in 2022-2023. Thus, the value of Outreach will hit about $10-12 billion. The expected return on investment is 120%.

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