SAN FRANCISCO — Front, a communication hub 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. Existing investors Sequoia Capital, Threshold Ventures and Uncork Capital also participated in the financing. This round values Front at $1.7 billion, bringing the company’s total funding to date over $200 million.
Front’s leadership heavily skews female: alongside co-founder & CEO Mathilde Collin, 80 percent of the executive team is female and 50 percent of Front’s managers are women. Private technology companies led by women are more capital-efficient, achieving 35 percent higher ROI, and, when venture-backed, 12 percent higher revenue than startups run by men, according to the Kauffman Foundation. Yet, according to PitchBook, female founders secured only 2 percent of venture capital in the U.S. in 2021, the smallest share since 2016.
Front enables human relationships at scale
Founded in 2013, Front is upending two of the largest and most deeply entrenched markets in SaaS: email and customer support software. Businesses that rely on strong customer relationships to differentiate themselves are underserved by the incumbents: Email is inefficient for teams, with no support for workflows, analytics or meaningful integration; support software creates efficiencies, it makes customers feel like numbers. Front surrounds every high-stakes conversation with team collaboration capabilities and customer data. Its customers use it to ensure 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 it’s designed to manage. Efficiencies tend to come at the cost of quality of service: the so called smart bots, the deflection techniques, the cold ticket numbers and impersonal processes. In the long run, both customers and businesses lose out. Front has taken a contrarian approach: we’re building technology that scales customer relationships without losing that human touch,” said Mathilde Collin, co-founder and CEO of Front. “This investment round, coming in the economic environment as it did, is a validation of that approach. Front has the potential to become the communications layer for meaningful relationships across the entire enterprise, and investors want to help us get there.”
Front has nearly 8,000 customers in over 100 countries, including five of the Fortune 25. The company has grown net new ARR by 120 percent YoY and is seeing strong traction in mid-market and enterprise with new business growing nearly 2X faster than other segments last year. Front’s Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) has averaged 98 percent in the past 12 months, and it has consistently been ranked one of the top 10 companies globally, according to Nicereply. Front consistently sees a level of engagement that’s far more common in consumer apps such as Netflix and Instagram than in B2B technology: 75 percent of Front’s monthly active users are also daily active users.
