Drift Announces Strategic Investment from Vista Equity Partners; Partnership Will Help Customers Accelerate Revenue via B2B Conversational Commerce

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Drift, the leader in Conversational Commerce for B2B, today announced a strategic partnership with Vista Equity Partners (“Vista)”, a leading global investment firm focused exclusively on enterprise software, data and technology-enabled businesses. Vista’s strategic growth investment in Drift will further accelerate the company’s mission to make business buying frictionless, more enjoyable and more human.

Drift has always been about reimagining the B2B buying experience. Today, Drift’s 50,000 customers are unifying sales and marketing teams on a single platform to deliver personalized conversations that build trust and accelerate revenue. In partnership with Vista, Drift will continue to invest in its customers’ success while expanding its product leadership, scaling globally and bringing Conversational Commerce to more B2B businesses.

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Drift introduced Conversational Marketing five years ago as a way to help marketers harness the digital experience for lead generation. The company quickly realized that removing the friction between buyers and sellers impacted much more than leads – it accelerated revenue. This led Drift to expand their focus to deliver a robust platform that includes Conversational Sales, integrating chat, email, video and artificial intelligence to power conversations, not just on the customers’ website, but to the sales team too.

In recent years, expectations around B2B buying experiences have blended to mirror B2C expectations. In fact, at least 80% of B2B buyers are not only looking for but expect a buying experience similar to that of a B2C customer (Lumoa, 2019). Additionally, the pandemic accelerated the urgency to transform how businesses drive revenue and underscored the importance of keeping conversations at the center of commerce. In 2021 alone, Drift’s customers generated $5 billion in pipeline value to fuel future deals by making the customer side of the buying process easier – proving that putting customers first in the sales and marketing cycle is a winning strategy.

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“Our purpose as a company remains simple and consistent: Build a platform that makes it simpler for customers to buy from you. We have an opportunity to bring learnings from the B2C buyer experience to the enterprise and introduce Conversational Commerce as a new B2B category,” said David Cancel, CEO of Drift. “Given its extensive experience investing in next-generation SaaS companies, we believe Vista is the best partner to help Drift – and our customers – further these efforts. I am excited to work with Vista’s team of investors, operators and technologists who will help us fulfill our ambitious vision and lead the Conversational Commerce category for decades to come.”

“David and I are proud to be one of the only Latino-founded companies to ever achieve over $1 billion valuation – a rare, Latino-founded unicorn. We want to see more of us do the same and we will pave the way for other Latino founders and leaders to achieve success,” said Elias Torres, CTO and cofounder of Drift. “Our partnership with Vista marks the start of Drift’s second chapter: Maniacally focusing on building an enduring company that accelerates innovation for customers.”

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