Headless CMS Contentful today announced that it had raised an $80 million Series E funding round led by Sapphire Ventures, with the participation of General Catalyst, Salesforce Ventures and several other new and existing investors. Despite this, the company has now raised a total of $158.3 million, and a Contentful representative tells me that the value is close to $ 1 billion.
Also, the company recently reported that it had employed Bridget Perry as its CMO. She has previously led Adobe’s marketing activities across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
Currently, 28 per cent of the Fortune 500 are using Contentful to manage their content across platforms. The company says that it already has a total of 2,200 paying clients, including Spotify, Bbc, Telus, Urban Outfitters and the British Museum.
Steve Sloan, the CEO of the company who joined the company late last year attributes his success to the fact that every business today is in the process of virtually finding out how to become digital and serve its customers across platforms – a process that has only been accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic.
“Ten or fifteen years ago, when these online platforms or content management systems were developed, they were a) primarily designed for a web-only environment, and b) where the website as a supplement to some another enterprise,” he said. “Today, the mobile app, the mobile web the interface is the front door for any company on the planet. And it has never been so evident than the recent COVID crisis, where many, many companies – including some who are very conventional – have discovered that the dominant and, in some cases, the only way their consumers can communicate with them is through the digital interface.
But as they look at their alternatives, many decide that they don’t just want to pull off the shelf, Sloan argues, as it doesn’t allow them to make a differentiated offering.
Perry also noted that this, too, was something she saw at Adobe as she developed her digital experience company. “Adobe ‘s leading marketing company, we used it ourselves,” she said. “And then the challenge we learned from market customers was how difficult it was in some cases to introduce, coordinate around, create those interactions quickly, and see benefit and effect on the company. And part of that challenge, I suppose, stemmed from the kind of monolithic, all-in-one package the Adobe provided. Just as a marketer at Adobe, we had difficulties to market and resilience with that kind of time. So what’s interest to me, is one of the reasons I joined Contentful – is that Contentful approaches this in a very different manner
Sloan noted that putting the round together was a little bit of an adventure. Contentful’s existing investors approached the company around the holidays because they wanted to make a more excellent investment in the company to support its long-term growth. At the time, however, the company was not yet able to raise new capital.
“And then, in January and February, we had inbound interest from people who were not yet investors, who came to us and said, ‘Hey, we want to invest in this business, we’ve seen the trend, and we believe in it.’ So we went back to our insiders and said, ‘Hey, we’re going to talk about actually moving in our timetable to raise money,’ Sloan told me. “And then, right around that time, I’m going to talk around it.
But that didn’t faze Contentful ‘s investors.
“One of the things that stand different our investors — and especially our leading investor in this Sapphire round — is that when everyone else was nervous, they were very clear about the potential, their confidence in the team, and their appreciation of the progress we’ve already made. And in terms of their support, they were unflinching, “Sloan adds,
Unsurprisingly, the company plans to use the new funding to expand its market-based efforts (which is why it hired Perry, after all). Still, Sloan also noted that Contentful plans to invest a bit in R&D as well as to help its customers solve more adjacent problems.
