SAN FRANCISCO – Front, a communications center for building strong customer relationships, has raised $ 65 million in Series D financing, led by Salesforce Ventures and Battery Ventures and with participation from PagerDuty CEO, Jennifer Tejada. Current investors Sequoia Capital, Threshold Ventures and Uncork Capital also participated in the financing. This round valued Front at $ 1.7 billion, bringing the company’s total funding to date to more than $ 200 million.
Front’s leadership is highly female-conceived: along with co-founder and CEO Mathilde Collin, 80 percent of the executive team are women and 50 percent of Front’s managers are women. Private technology companies led by women are better at capital, achieving 35 percent higher ROI, and, when venture-backed, 12 percent higher profits than male-run startups, according to the Kauffman Foundation. However, according to PitchBook, female founders acquired only 2 percent of venture capital in the U.S. in 2021, the smallest share since 2016.
The front allows human relationships in size
Founded in 2013, Front raises two of the largest and most deeply entrenched SaaS markets: email and customer support software. Businesses that rely on strong customer engagement to differentiate themselves are not getting the attention of incumbents: Email isn’t great for teams, with no support for workflows, analytics or meaningful integration; Support software creates efficiencies, it makes customers seem like numbers. Frontline surrounds every high-profile conversation with team collaboration capabilities and customer data. Its customers use it to ensure that responses are always fast, accurate and deeply personalized. Unlike customer ticketing software, Front’s modern interface is inspired by email clients, which team members love because it’s familiar and easy to use.
“When it comes to customer communication, technology rarely improves the relationships this government has designed. The efficiencies tend to come at the cost of service quality: the so -called smart bots, the diversion techniques, the cold ticket numbers and impersonal processes. In the long run, both customers and businesses go bankrupt. Front has taken a contrarian approach: we create technology that measures customer interactions without losing that human relationship, ”said Mathilde Collin, co-founder and CEO of Front. “This investment round, coming into the economic environment as it did, is a validation of that strategy. The Front has the potential to be the communication layer for meaningful enterprise-wide relationships, and investors want to help us get there. “
Front has nearly 8,000 customers in more than 100 countries, including five in Fortune 25. The company’s new ARR grew 120 percent YoY and is seeing strong traction in the mid-market and enterprise with new business growing nearly 2X which is faster than last year segments. Front’s Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) has averaged 98 percent over the past 12 months, and it has consistently ranked in one of the top 10 companies worldwide, according to Nicereply. Front continues to see a level of engagement that is more common in consumer apps like Netflix and Instagram than in B2B technology: 75 percent of Front’s monthly active users are daily active users.