(Outreach Photo)

Seattle has a new unicorn.

Sales automation startup Outreach has reeled in a huge $114 million investment round that pushes its valuation to $1.1 billion, joining an elite club of other fast-growing companies also valued above $1 billion.

Outreach CEO Manny Medina. (Outreach Photo)

“That’s right: Outreach is officially a ‘unicorn’ and the only one in the rapidly growing sales engagement space,” Outreach CEO Manny Medina wrote in a blog post.

Outreach has been on a roll for the past few years with its software that uses machine learning to help customers such as Cloudera, Adobe, Microsoft, Docusign, and others automate and streamline communication with sales prospects. The technology offers one system to track all touch points, from phone calls to emails to LinkedIn messages, and integrates with existing tools including Salesforce and Gmail.

Outreach more than doubled its revenue in 2018 and met all goals and metrics, Medina told GeekWire earlier this year. The company now has more than 3,300 customer accounts and 50,000-plus users. It employs 315 people and plans to reach 450 by the end of 2019.

Medina said the company will continue to invest in its hometown, with a goal of becoming “the next enterprise beacon of Seattle.”

Lone Pine Capital, a Greenwich, Conn.-based hedge fund manager, led the Series E round. Meritech Capital Partners and Lemonade Capital joined the round, as did existing investors DFJ Growth, Four Rivers Group, Mayfield, Microsoft Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, Spark Capital and Trinity Ventures.

Lone Pine Capital previously invested in Convoy, another Seattle startup that reached unicorn status last year. Other companies with valuations north of $1 billion in the Seattle region include Rover and OfferUp.

(Outreach Photo)

The $114 million round for Outreach follows a $65 million round that came in this past May. Total funding to date is $239 million.

“This financing will enable us to infuse every aspect of the customer journey with the power of machine learning so organizations can identify the actions that move the needle in order to make better, faster decisions,” Medina wrote in the blog post. “We will also expand in the coming months by doubling our machine learning team, increasing our international footprint, and investing in our partner ecosystem, Galaxy, as well as our recently announced integration with Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 for Sales.”

Here are the 10 highest-valued startups in the Seattle area 

Medina told GeekWire in February that “this upcoming year we will make more investments in scaling the business efficiently and prepare for an IPO a few years out.”

Medina, a former director at Microsoft, originally launched a recruiting software startup called GroupTalent in 2011 with his co-founders Andrew Kinzer, Gordon Hempton, and Wes Hather. But the entrepreneurs pivoted in 2014 to focus on building tools for salespeople.

“Outreach is one of my favorite stories,” Founders Co-op’ Managing Partner Chris DeVore, an early Outreach investor, told GeekWire earlier this year. “The business they set out to build wasn’t working, but because they stuck together as a founding team and kept adapting and learning, they figured out how to find a productive thing. But that wasn’t because of where they started or the early metrics. It was because as humans, they were so committed and resilient and so gritty that they figured it out.”

Outreach is ranked No. 23 on the GeekWire 200, our index of top Pacific Northwest startups. Outreach is also a finalist for Next Tech Titan, a category at the upcoming GeekWire Awards that highlights future dominant forces in the Pacific Northwest tech scene.

Last year, Outreach leased a big chunk of office space to upgrade its headquarters and made its first-ever acquisition. It was the only Seattle company to crack the top 25 in LinkedIn’s Top Startups list for 2018.

Forbes and CBInsights previously predicted that Outreach would reach unicorn status. There are 341 unicorn companies worldwide, according to CBInsights, with nearly 30 startups reaching that milestone in 2019. Recode reported that 57 companies became unicorns in 2017.

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