Catalyst Raises $25M Series B Funding led by Spark Capital

I’m proud to announce on the heels of our Series A from Accel, Catalyst has just closed another round of funding - a $25M Series B led by Spark Capital. Over the last 9 months, we’ve had almost 400% ARR growth, incredible satisfaction from existing users, and rapid customer growth count.

Recognizing customer success operates differently for every company, we’re blessed that so many organizations trust in the innovative approach Catalyst has toward customer management. While we were not seeking new capital, we have been humbled by the investor excitement about our business, leading us to add Spark Capital to the Catalyst family.

“We are thrilled to partner with what we believe will ultimately become a category-defining company,” said Will Reed, General Partner at Spark Capital. “After speaking with many of Catalyst’s customers, it was clear they offer the most intuitive workflow software for Customer Success teams, along with the most powerful way for product managers, marketers, data scientists, and executives to engage strategically around their existing customer relationships.”

Now more than ever, every CEO, venture capitalist, board member, and financial analyst believes the function of customer success is the responsibility of every single department. In order for this to happen, companies must look at a consistent set of data across the organization to assess customer engagement. Currently, with departments using different tools in most companies, it’s difficult to have an accurate representation of the health of your customers. One of our core values is to build the most intuitive and beautiful user experience – from getting set up in minutes to operating a powerful software without the need for training and extensive implementation.

Catalyst is the only CS software that helps businesses move customer success to the center of their organization. Since February, Catalyst's platform has experienced a 40% increase in customer meeting notes, 70% increase in to-do tasks for customers, and most astounding – a 23% increase in users added to the platform. Many of our customers are adding colleagues from product, leadership, marketing, and data analytics into Catalyst.

“Domino is industry-recognized for our strong Customer Success team. Catalyst has been an instrumental partner in helping us drive our key initiatives, as well as providing a single source of truth for customer health across all of our departments” -- David Cole, Chief Customer Officer at Domino Data Lab

During a time when economic slow-down is occurring and projected to continue, sales is decelerating and budgets are getting slashed - customer success continues to be an area of investment organizations are prioritizing.

“It’s never been more important to double down and serve your existing customers,” said Vas Natarajan at Accel, an existing investor who followed on the round. “Businesses thriving in this environment put Customer Success at the heart of their organization. Before you win new customers, become indispensable to the ones you already have.”

As with any organization able to receive funding in this climate, we consider ourselves to be very fortunate. I can’t say enough about how tough it’s been to see friends of our team suffer from layoffs and other personal and professional loss.

Catalyst plans to use this new funding to heavily invest in supporting the CS community. In the coming quarters, we will get our software into the hands of more businesses to support their customer retention efforts, create programs that will further evangelize the importance of the CS job function, as well as create more job opportunities for those in CS and those looking to transition into CS. We will also create events (physical or virtual) to connect thought leaders in the community to continue building CS momentum.

See below for a recent event our team put together where New York's CS leaders from companies like Segment, InVision, Carta, Asana, Greenhouse Software and Braze gathered to discuss the #futureofCS!

Along with this new funding, Catalyst is also launching our new logo and website, a blog post will follow soon highlighting the value of design and how it is the foundation of everything we do.

As a team of 35+ and counting (we’re hiring!) our short-term success has always been a reflection of what a small, humble and focused group can do. At Catalyst, we are blessed with the best teams: world class Engineering, forward thinking Product, user experience first Design, Sales that believes in right-fit customers beyond just the dollar revenue, CS that lives in the center and People Operations that anchors our foundation. In reflecting on the shelter-in-place we’ve experienced these past several weeks - despite the transition to a remote workforce, our team has bonded closer as a family. What has defined us is not the software we shipped or the customers that we’ve gained, but our commitment to one another as humans. Beyond the weekly Zoom lunches and game nights, our People team has done an incredible job providing resources such as a stipend to improve home workstations and access to mental health support. A big part of this funding will be continued investment into the single most important aspect of our business and the foundation of Catalyst - our people. In the next 12 months our hiring motions will not change. We will continue to build toward becoming New York’s leading SaaS organization.

A big thank you to our customers, advisors, investors, friends in the CS community, and our families for always believing in our mission to redefine customer success.