The incumbents underserved businesses that rely on strong client ties to differentiate themselves: Email is inefficient for teams because it does not provide workflows, analytics, or meaningful integration; support software creates efficiencies, but it treats customers as statistics.
Front, a communication hub that combines collaboration capabilities and contextual data from many systems to help you create client interactions across digital channels recently raised $65M in Series D funding round.
The investment was headed by Salesforce Ventures and Battery Ventures, with participation from PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada, as well as existing investors Sequoia Capital, Threshold Ventures, and Uncork Capital, and valued Front at $1.7B. This has helped the startup to become the 11th woman founded SaaS unicorn.
Fund utilisation
The San Francisco-based company will utilise the funds to increase investments in product development efforts, new partnerships, geographies, and gain market share in industries where customer relationships drive business success more than any other factor, such as professional services, financial services, logistics, and B2B technology, among others, and to continue driving the company’s global expansion, particularly in EMEA, where it has offices in Paris and Dublin.
Mathilde Collin, front CEO and co-founder, is one of only ten women who have founded and served as CEO of both public and private SaaS companies valued at more than $1B. Front’s valuation has more than doubled as a result of this fresh funding. Laurent Perrin is also the co-founder of the company.
Future plans
Front is actively looking for candidates for go-to-market, technical, and other positions in San Francisco, Chicago, Paris, Dublin, and remotely.
The SaaS unicorn has roughly 8,000 customers from more than 100 countries. Shopify Inc., Airbnb Inc., and Lyft Inc. all use its email and customer support software. Mathilde Collin founded the company in Paris in 2013, where it still has an office. According to its website, Front presently employs more than 250 people and has raised $200M in total in terms of funding.
“When it comes to customer communication, technology rarely improves the relationships it’s designed to manage. Efficiencies tend to come at the cost of quality of service: the so called smart bots, the deflection techniques, the cold ticket numbers and impersonal processes. In the long run, both customers and businesses lose out. Front has taken a contrarian approach: we’re building technology that scales customer relationships without losing that human touch,” said Mathilde Collin, co-founder and CEO of Front. “This investment round, coming in the economic environment as it did, is a validation of that approach. Front has the potential to become the communications layer for meaningful relationships across the entire enterprise, and investors want to help us get there.”
“Front has emerged as a mission critical customer communication platform for companies of all shapes and sizes across” said Alex Kayyal, Managing Partner at Salesforce Ventures. “We’re delighted to support such a talented team as they tap into the massive opportunity to marry collaboration tools and data to strengthen relationships via digital channels.”
“At Battery we’ve closely studied the evolution of customer communication and collaboration software more broadly, and our work has made us extremely excited about Front’s vision in this sector and its ability to execute,” said Battery Ventures General Partner, Neeraj Agrawal. “Mathilde and her team have not only built a great business—they’ve built a great culture around highly satisfied employees who are channeling that enthusiasm back into the product. We couldn’t be more thrilled to partner with Front.”
