Do surveys still matter? Qualtrics’ $150 million funding round proves they do
Sometimes, it’s best just to ask.
Even in the era of real-time social media tracking and automated sentiment analysis, the humble survey remains a powerful tool. So much so that Qualtrics Inc. has raised a massive $150 million from two of the biggest venture capital firms in Silicon Valley on Wednesday to help enterprises make the most out of their online polls.
The Utah-based firm, which is already profitable, offers a suite of cloud-based services that acts as a self-contained environment for building and rolling out questionnaires at a massive scale. The platform enables users to assemble customized polls from hundreds of pre-designed elements, including standarized answer types as well as advanced logic, and push out the finished survey to the target audiences. The results are then streamed back to the researcher through a real-time reporting layer that Qualtrics says makes it possible to visualize the raw statistics in an easily understandable format and share key findings with the relevant parties inside their organization.
Just as significantly, the suite is not limited to polling customers on their opinions of a certain product or service. The company touts that its offering is also useful for measuring the effectiveness of ads, gauging employee satisfaction, engaging students on campus and a host of other applications in the corporate world as well as the academia
Qualtrics’ comprehensive approach to online surveying has earned it a lot of fans – over 6,000, to be exact, including McDonald’s Corp., Columbia University, The Walt Disney Company and a host of other household names. Joining the club is early Twitter Inc. backer Insight Venture Partners, which led the latest $150 million round in the company. The funding also included “significant” contributions from original investors Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital, which had previously plunked down $70 million in their largest joint round to date.
Qualtrics said that the new capital will help sustain the 90-plus-percent annual revenue growth rate it has maintained for the last five years and fuel expansion into new markets, which a release made clear not only means regions but also adjacent segments. Accordingly, a part of the funding will be allocated for strategic acquisitions to that end.
photo credit: qthomasbower via photopin cc
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