One final $100M ARR company and the startups we want to meet in 2021

As we head toward the exits of 2020, we have one more name to add to our roll call of private companies that have reached the $100 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) milestone. Well, one and a half.

But before we get into Nexthink and give Coalition a honorable mention, let’s talk about the startups we’re looking for in 2021.

The $100 million ARR list came together by accident, a quirk of a news cycle that happened to have a few companies reach the threshold when I was in transition back to working at TechCrunch. So, when I got back into our WordPress install, the group of companies that had each recently reached nine-figure revenues was top of mind.

But looking at $100 million ARR companies proved less useful than we might have hoped. Mostly what we managed was to collect a bucket of companies that were about to go public.

That was always a risk. As we wrote at the time:

Perhaps the startup market would do well to celebrate the $50 million ARR mark even more loudly. At $50 million ARR, a startup is scaling to IPO size. That’s the goal, after all.

This is our aim for 2021.

If your startup is approaching the $50 million ARR mark, or the $50 million annual run rate threshold, I want to hear from you. Drop a line if your startup has an annualized run rate between $35 million and $60 million, is privately held, and you are willing to chat about how quickly it is growing. (The Exchange first raised this idea in November.)

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

But that’s next year. Today, let’s chat about Nexthink, what the hell “digital employee experience” is and what’s good with cyber insurance and why it’s helping Coalition grow rapidly.

Nexthink gets IPO ready

Nexthink is a venture-backed software company with headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland and Boston. Nexthink raised external capital in modest amounts from 2006 until 2014, when the startup picked up a $28.6 million round that Crunchbase marks as a corporate investment.

That round was the company’s first worth more than $10 million. (Update: This section has been updated to better reflect Nexthink’s fundraising history, which a prior data source had laid out differently.)

From there, Nexthink was a venture capital success story, presumably scaling quickly as it raised two larger rounds in 2016 and 2018 worth an estimated $40 million (Series B), and $85 million (Series C), respectively. Nexthink was valued at a little over $558 million (post-money) following its 2018 round according to PitchBook data.

How did the company attract so much external funding? By building digital experience management software. Which, after doing a bit of research this morning, appears to be software aimed at tracking what corporate end users are doing with devices and how well software running on those devices perform.