Startup Clari Inc., which helps companies such as UiPath Inc. and Databricks Inc. streamline their sales operations, has closed a $225 million investment at a $2.6 million valuation.

The investment, announced today, is notable for multiple reasons. Clari’s new $2.6 billion valuation is more than four times higher than what the startup was worth only two years ago. Also noteworthy is that the funding round was led by Blackstone and included the participation of Silver Lake. The two firms are among the most prominent players in the private equity ecosystem. 

Blackstone and Silver Lake were joined by a long list of other tech investors. Bain Capital Ventures, Madrona Ventures, Sapphire Ventures and Sequoia Capital were among the more than half-dozen firms that participated in Clari’s funding round.

Sunnyvale, California-based Clari offers a cloud platform of the same name that helps enterprises increase the efficiency of their sales efforts. The platform collects data about a company’s sales operations from sources such as its customer relationship management platform. Clari then uses artificial intelligence to analyze the collected data and find insights that can help the company boost its revenue growth.

One of Clari’s main features is an AI-powered revenue forecasting engine. Estimates of future revenue are essential to a company’s sales operations because they help executives track the effectiveness of their customer acquisition strategy and find areas for improvement. According to Clari, its AI-powered sales forecasting “is the most accurate in the world.”

Clari enables customer to generate projections not only for an entire company but also specific revenue segments. A Clari user can, for example, create separate forecasts to predict revenue from new customers and sales to existing clients. It’s also possible to generate projections for individual product lines. 

Revenue forecasts take into account multiple factors, including how new deals a company expects to close in the time frame covered by the prediction and how much they’re worth. Clari enables executives to track the individual sales opportunities that factor into a revenue forecast. The startup’s AI automatically highlights potential deals that are at risk of not closing and provides pointers to help companies address the issue.

More than 450 organizations use Clari’s platform as part of their sales operations, including many leading players in the enterprise technology market. UiPath, Databricks, HashiCorp and Nutanix Inc. are among firms that Clari counts as users. The startup says that 18 of its customers went public in 2021 alone.

“Clari has transformed the revenue and sales process from an antiquated mess to a software- and data-driven business process that is minting new industry juggernauts,” said Clari co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Andy Byrne. “The best of the best run their businesses through Clari, using our powerful data and insights to outperform the market and their competitors.”

Clari’s latest $225 million funding round will help it add yet more enterprises to its installed base. Blackstone, which led the round, said that it will explore opportunities to introduce Clari’s software to its more than 250 portfolio companies. Blackstone joins no fewer than seven other private equity firms that have partnered with the startup to support their portfolio companies.

Using the new funding, Clari plans to hire 300 employees this year and grow its presence in international markets. Also on the agenda: acquiring other companies with technology that can advance its product development efforts.

Image: Clari