小蓝视频色情网页版

, a Philadelphia-based collaborative knowledge management software provider, has raised $30 million in a Series C funding round led by .

Existing backers including , 听补苍诲 , and Michael Dell鈥檚 also participated in the financing. The new capital brings the company鈥檚 to nearly $71 million, according to 小蓝视频色情网页版 data. led its in December of 2018.

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Guru CEO and co-founder notes that the digital transformation has been accelerated with the COVID-19 pandemic forcing so many people to work remotely.

鈥淐ompanies of every size and category are transitioning to remote work, changing their services to meet needs, and seeing sudden drops (or increases) in demand,鈥� he said. 鈥淕iven recent events, we are increasing our commitment [to customers] to make sure that collaborative knowledge management feels easy and is attainable for all teams.鈥�

Guru claims to have pioneered the software category of knowledge management operating under the premise that 鈥渢he information you need to do your job should find you.鈥�

The company delivers its offering via a browser plugin that surfaces data sitting across a worker鈥檚 distributed cloud apps directly into whatever workflow tool a user is in. It operates as a SaaS (software-as-a-service company) and is powered by artificial intelligence (AI).

鈥淲e think it is the next big thing in collaboration software,鈥� said Accel Partner. 鈥淔rom our experience as early investors in Atlassian, Slack, Dropbox and other foundational productivity apps, we can see that Guru is the underlying thread that ties them all together.鈥�

鈥淚n a COVID setting, Guru has proven to be ‘a major enabler’ of remote work,” he added.

Customers include the likes of Shopify (here鈥檚 a on how it uses Guru), Spotify, Slack, Zoom, Glossier, Sweetgreen, GitHub, Airtable and Noom.

Launched from experience

Nucci and co-founder had previously worked together at , a cloud computing company founded by Nucci that ultimately was .

鈥淭here, we lived the pain Guru now solves,鈥� Nucci told 小蓝视频色情网页版 News. 鈥淲e wanted to figure out how you provide employees the knowledge they need to do their jobs, bring it into their workflows and make sure it doesn鈥檛 go out of date and stays accurate.鈥�

So they launched Guru in early 2014.

In the second half of 2018, the company launched both AI Suggest Text and , which aim to deliver knowledge proactively to revenue teams in real-time and eliminate the need to search.

The company has been doubling ARR (annual recurring revenue) year over year. But earlier this year, the company tried a new tactic that proved wildly successful.

鈥淲e launched a free version of Guru in January, and immediately saw a spike in the daily rate of new customers signing up,鈥� Nucci told 小蓝视频色情网页版 News. 鈥淚t was pretty amazing.鈥�

In three months, Guru has tripled the number of customers it鈥檚 had in its entire history, he said. By giving people the opportunity to try its offering for free, it鈥檚 opened up to even more potential users.

鈥淭hey can upgrade to a paid plan,鈥� he said. 鈥淲e design the plans to be appropriate as a team grows. Customers, for example, can convert to a paid plan when they want more robust permission capabilities, or access to extensive analytics.鈥�

Customers are industry agnostic but Nucci told me he sees some common themes.

鈥淭hey tend to really want to provide a very strong customer experience, and want to be very responsive,鈥� he said. 鈥淐ustomer service really matters to them.鈥�

Philly growth

Guru has a growing presence in San Francisco, where it鈥檚 hired away folks from companies such as Zendesk and UserTesting. Of its 160 employees, about 110 work in Philadelphia, 30 in the Bay Area and the remainder are remote. Anne Raimondi serves as the company鈥檚 chief customer officer out of its San Francisco office.

鈥淚magine an account executive looking for a customer case study while typing notes into Salesforce, a product manager searching for a roadmap document while working in Jira, a support rep in need of product FAQs while resolving tickets in Zendesk, or any worker at any company searching for the wifi password, building access code or benefits enrollment tutorial,鈥� Clements wrote in a blog. 鈥淕uru surfaces the knowledge you need without disrupting your work.聽 By creating the unifying meta-layer to serve up the right content from the right data store at the right time, directly into a user鈥檚 workflow, Guru is shaping the market for content collaboration.鈥�

Meanwhile, we鈥檝e noticed that the Philadelphia startup scene is heating up. In 2019 alone, the city saw a number of large deals including a $750 million -led for ; a $250 million for ; a $115.5 million and a $110 million 听蹿辞谤

Overall, venture funding in the Philadelphia region more than tripled in 2019 to $1.7 billion compared to $515.2 million in 2018, as you can see in the chart below. That is up eight times compared to the $210.7 million raised in 2017, according to 小蓝视频色情网页版 data.

鈥淭here is a very special movement around reinvestment in the community and giving back,鈥� Clements told 小蓝视频色情网页版 News. 鈥淲e see a lot of founders in the ecosystem spending a lot of hands-on time with the local business incubator. That level of involvement and intangible passion is unique to Philly, we believe.鈥�

In 2018, I took an in-depth look at Pittsburgh’s startup scene, which you can check out here.

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