Funding HEAP Image by TheDigitalWay from PixabayHeap, the digital insights platform, has announced the closing of a $110 million Series D funding round led by Sixth Street Capital. The Growth Equity business within Goldman Sachs Asset Management (Goldman Sachs) invested in Heap for the first time.

Existing investors participating included NewView Capital, Menlo Ventures, DTCP, Triangle Peak Partners, Alliance Bernstein Private Credit Investors, Maverick Ventures, and The Private Shares Fund. The amount is double what Heap raised in its Series C funding round led by NewView Capital in 2019. It brings the total amount raised to $205 million.

Heap was valued at $960 million and will achieve unicorn status imminently. Over the last year, it has achieved triple-digit growth. It has attracted customers such as Splunk, E*Trade, Freshworks, Crunchbase and esurance.

Ken Fine, CEO of Heap
Ken Fine, CEO of Heap

Ken Fine, CEO of Heap, commented, “McKinsey research notes that while there are 100 million hits on agile transformation, two-thirds of organizations that are looking to become more agile are still treading water and achieving little or no business impact. Our new funding will help us further innovate to foster the significant business outcomes that McKinsey says can be achieved, including ‘30% gains in efficiency, customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and operational performance.'”

Where will it spend the money?

Heap has grown quickly with offices in New York, San Francisco and London. The announcement indicates that the money will be spent on further product innovation and global expansion. Usually, Series D is split between international growth, and R&D. What isn’t clear is where it is looking to expand globally, and this is not mentioned in the release. Australia may be on the cards as it already has an engineering presence in Sydney, Australia.

The Heap Digital Insights Platform surfaces information and insights about how customers use websites and products. It unveiled Heap Illuminate in June 2021, a suite of tools that surfaces the unknown unknowns of user behaviour. Illuminate captures customer actions and turns them into insights to improve decision making.

More recently, it launched Journey Maps, which identifies the real journeys that customers make on websites, uncovering which steps help a user to convert no matter how convoluted the journey

Heap recently published its Digital Experience Insights report. It found that 84% of funnel analyses deliver misleading data. Furthermore, 59% of funnels miss an interaction associated with lower conversion. In 63% of funnels, there’s an alternative path to conversion that isn’t tracked.

Heap claims Illuminate provides the digital experience insights other tools miss. Why is this important? Ryan Koonce, Mammoth Growth CEO & Founder, explains: “With Product Analytics we can now look, at a personal level, what features we should roll out or which features we should sunset. We can understand churn. We can understand what behaviours people are taking in different segments. You’ll use that to optimise the experience that your customer has on your website.”

New appointments

Alongside the funding, Heap also announced several key appointments. Sixth Street and Goldman Sachs will provide a member to the Heap board. While a board position for Sixth Street is almost inevitable as the lead investor, the Goldman Sachs allocation indicates that it was probably a significant investment.

Michael McGinn, Partner and Co-Head of Sixth Street Growth. Commented, “Heap’s data-driven culture, strong technology leadership, and scalable architecture has made it a leader within the fast-growing digital insights sector. Their strategy for continuing to create innovative technology will put more advanced and easy-to-use digital insights into the hands of daily practitioners so they can quickly improve their products and accelerate their business. We look forward to supporting Ken and his team in their next phase of growth.” 

In addition to the board appointments, Heap also confirmed several senior appointments. Rachel Obstler becomes EVP of Product. She joined the company as VP of Product in January 2021 from PagerDuty.

Ahmed Quadri joined the company in June 2021 as Chief Customer Officer, and Sean Andrew was promoted to Chief Revenue Office in August. He has spent several years in senior sales appointments at companies including MongoDB, AppDynamics and BMC.

Steve Love is the most recent appointed, joining as CFO in September 2021. He is an experienced CFO and has helped several PE-backed firms grow successfully, including Juniper Square, MBlox and Dialpad.

Enterprise Times: What does this mean

This is a significant investment for any firm. The timing shows a more cautious but steady growth by the Heap leadership than other firms. It has more than 8,000 customers already and is poised for another round of growth. Looking forward, will Heap invest in further integrations. It already lists four integrations Iterable, Salesforce, Marketo and Intercom. Will it add to these with SAP and Oracle, or will it seek to deepen the ties with its existing partners?

Heap will also need to accelerate the growth of its solutions partner network. It only lists six currently and will need to grow that list rapidly. It has none headquartered in Europe, and most are focused on North America.

With the influx of funds, will Heap look to acquire more technology, or will it become a target for Adobe or Salesforce to extend their solutions? Regardless of the end game, expect to hear more from Heap over the coming months.

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