Nexthink nabs $180M Series D on $1.1B valuation

We often hear about companies working to improve the customer experience, but for IT their customers are the company’s employees. Nexthink, a late stage startup that wants to help IT serve its internal constituents better, announced a $180 million Series D today on a healthy $1.1 billion valuation.

The firm, which was founded in Lucerne, Switzerland and has offices outside of Boston, received funding from Permira with help from Highland Europe and Index Ventures. The company has now raised over $336 million, according to Crunchbase data.

As you might imagine, understanding how folks are using a company’s technology choices internally is always going to be useful, but when the pandemic hit and offices closed, having access to this type of data became even more important.

Nexthink CEO and co-founder Pedro Bados says that most monitoring tools are focused on figuring out if the systems are working correctly and finding ways to fix them. Nexthink takes a different approach, looking at how employees are adopting the tools a company is offering.

“What we do at Nexthink is to take the [monitoring] problem from a completely different perspective. We say that we’re going to give your IT department a real time understanding of how employees are experiencing IT [at your company],” Bados told me.

He says that they do this by looking at the problem from the employees’ perspective. “At the end of the day we’re giving all the insights to IT departments to make sure they can improve the digital experience of their employees,” he said.

This could involve querying the user base in the same way that HR and marketing survey tools allow companies to check the pulse of employees or customers. By gathering this type of data, it helps IT understand how employees are using the company’s technology choices.

This software is aimed at larger organizations with at least 5000 employees. Today, the company has over a 1000 of these customers including Best Buy, Fidelity, Liberty Mutual and 3M. What’s more, the company has surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue, a success benchmark for SaaS companies like Nexthink.

Nexthink currently has 700 employees with plans to reach 900 by the end of this year, and as a maturing startup, Bados has given a lot of thought on how to build a diverse workforce. Just being spread out in two countries gives an element of geographic diversity, but he says it takes more than that, and it all starts with recruitment.

“The way to make sure we get more diversity is we look at recruitment and make sure that we have a balanced pipeline. That’s something we measure as a company,” he said. They also have a diversity committee, which is charged with delivering diversity training and figuring out ways to hire a more diverse and inclusive workforce.

While the company has a healthy valuation and a good amount of money in the bank, Bados doesn’t see an IPO for at least a couple of years. He says he wants to double or triple the business before taking that step. For now, though with $180 million in additional runway and a $100 million in ARR, the company is well positioned for whatever future moves it chooses to make.