Front will use its latest funds to drive its EMEA expansion in Dublin and Paris. It announced it was hiring in Dublin last year.
Front, a US software company specialising in customer relationships, has announced the closing of its $65m Series D funding round.
The round was led by Salesforce Ventures and Battery Ventures. The CEO of US cloud SaaS company PagerDuty also participated. Front’s existing investors Sequoia Capital, Threshold Ventures and Uncork Capital returned to participate in the latest round of financing also.
The Series D round values Front at $1.7bn, meaning its valuation has more than doubled. Front’s total funding to date comes in at over $200 million. The company’s CEO and co-founder Mathilde Collin, joins a very small, albeit prestigious list of women to who have both founded and held the lead role at both a public and private SaaS unicorn.
According to Crunchbase’s Unicorn Board, there are just 10 such companies out of a total of 1,360 unicorns.
Front was set up in 2013 and it serves around 8,000 clients in more than 100 countries. Its users include Shopify, Airbnb, Hulu, Lyft and Mailchimp.
Last October, Front said that its planned expansion into Ireland would create several new jobs. At the time of its Irish hiring announcement, Front said it planned to build a team here before opening an office in Dublin.
The start-up will use its funding to grow its operations in Dublin and Paris as part of its EMEA expansion. It also plans to accelerate investments in both product and go-to-market initiatives. It will increase investments in product development to empower support, operations and account management teams to build long-lasting relationships at scale.
For go-to-market, it will invest in new partnerships, geographies and gaining market share in industries such as professional services, financial services, logistics and B2B technology.
Describing the success Front has had so far, Collin said it had taken a “contrarian approach.”
“We’re building technology that scales customer relationships without losing that human touch,” she said, adding that, in her view, tech improvements in the CRM space sometimes compromised on the human aspect. This means businesses and customers alike lose out.
“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,” Collin concluded.
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Source by www.siliconrepublic.com
