Outreach Closes $50 Million Round Hires Melissa Fisher as CFO

The leading sales engagement platform increases valuation and expands product investments; welcomes experienced SaaS CFO to the company

Outreach, the largest sales engagement platform with industry-leading usage announced today it has closed a $50 million funding round. This new round of funding comes at a time when funding has been more difficult to come by and many startups are experiencing challenges fundraising. Outreach remains the only unicorn in the rapidly growing sales engagement category.

“The pandemic has changed sales forever and brought to the forefront the importance of having a sales engagement platform. Products like Outreach that provide high visibility and versatility — are now required for all sellers in order to be successful,” said Manny Medina, CEO and co-founder of Outreach. “As the Sales Engagement category leader, customers expect Outreach to drive transformative changes in sales. With this round of funding, we’re excited to accelerate our investments to meet the increasing demand we are seeing in the market while continuing to innovate.”

This funding round is led by Sands Capital with participation by Salesforce Ventures. In addition, new investor Operator Collective will be joining existing investors which include Lone Pine Capital, Spark Capital, Meritech Capital Partners, Trinity Ventures, Mayfield, and Sapphire Ventures. This round brings Outreach’s valuation up to $1.33 billion and total funding to $289 million.

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“Outreach’s leadership position in the market, clear mission, and value-added approach make the company a natural investment choice for us,” said Michael Clarke, partner at Sands Capital’s Global Innovation Fund. “Now more than ever, companies need an AI-powered sales engagement platform like Outreach. Enterprise sales teams are rapidly adopting sales engagement platforms and Outreach’s rapid growth reflects this.”

Outreach will use the funding to continue to deliver new revolutionary technologies like Outreach Kaia, the new Knowledge AI Assistant the company unveiled at its seminal industry event Unleash last month. The company is also moving forward with its expansion plans and investing in new markets, including adding new global outposts and growing its EMEA presence. Outreach’s investments will help not only transform sales engagement but revolutionize the entire customer lifecycle for go-to-market teams.

Outreach also announced the expansion of its executive team today with the hiring of Melissa Fisher as its chief financial officer. Fisher comes to Outreach from Qualys, a $4 billion-plus publicly-traded leading provider of cloud-based IT, security, and compliance SaaS solutions.  She was responsible for scaling the financial planning & analysis, accounting, tax & treasury, sales operations, and investor relations functions as Qualys more than doubled to over 1,300 employees worldwide. During Fisher’s tenure at Qualys, the company’s industry-leading EBITDA margins expanded to 44 percent and its stock price increased more than 400 percent.

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“Melissa is the right leader to help guide Outreach through its next phase of our growth,” said Medina. “She has extensive experience scaling a publicly-traded B2B SaaS company — especially in an accelerated growth atmosphere. Melissa’s combined experience in not only financial planning but investor relations and efficient revenue growth will be crucial for us as we look to the future.”

Fisher has more than 20 years of strategic finance experience in mergers and acquisitions, corporate governance, and investment banking from her time at Goldman Sachs and Bank of America Securities advising on over $400 billion of transactions. She received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and a Master’s degree in business administration from Harvard Business School. Fisher also serves as a director on the Board of ModelN Inc., a publicly-traded leader in cloud revenue management solutions.

“Joining Outreach is an incredible opportunity. I’m passionate about leveraging data to drive sales and go-to-market success as well as building scalable processes that increase sales & business velocity,” said Fisher. “Outreach’s position as the number one sales engagement platform aligns with my belief that driving revenue is a top corporate objective and creates an enormous market opportunity for Outreach.”

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