Work collaboration software company Smartsheet acquired 10,000ft, a Seattle startup that helps companies plan and manage how they use their resources.
The deal will help Smartsheet customers improve planning and allocating resources to projects and better track how long tasks are taking versus projections. The 27-person startup brings with it more than 1,000 customers — including Accenture, PwC and Stanford University — and strengthens Smartsheet’s pitch to potential marketing and professional services customers.
“Effective resource management is a mission critical need for many organizations today, yet most tools specializing in capacity planning are overly complex and costly to manage,” Smartsheet CEO Mark Mader said in a statement. “10,000ft offers a unique combination of enterprise-grade functionality with simplicity and ease-of-use, aligning with our vision to empower everyone to more effectively plan, track, automate, and report on work.”
The companies did not disclose terms of the deal.
Smartsheet said the two companies have several customers in common. Customer suggestions that Smartsheet build features similar to 10,000ft’s offerings sparked the initial discussions that led to the acquisition.
10,000ft was created as an internal project planning tool at Seattle-based product and industrial design firm Artefact, and then spun out on its own in 2012. It was led by Martijn van Tilburg, a designer from Microsoft who got his start working on products like Office and Windows and then spent six years as director of design for Artefact.
It has been rising in recent months on the GeekWire 200 list of privately-held companies, most recently ranking #177.
“We started 10,000ft in 2012 with three employees on a mission to free the world from the weeds of traditional tools with lackluster user experiences,” the company wrote today in a post announcing the acquisition. “Our stake in the ground was all about creating simple but powerful, beautifully designed software so modern teams could take a breath and see the big picture of their businesses. Our product roadmap was long enough to keep us busy for a hundred years.”
The acquisition is Smartsheet’s third overall in its 13 years of existence, but its second so far in 2019. In January, Smartsheet scooped up Slope, a small Seattle startup founded in 2014 that helps companies manage the creative project production process.
Smartsheet, which went public a year ago, calls itself the “leading cloud-based platform for work execution.” The company’s stock is up 75 percent so far in 2019, buoyed by a strong close to its 2018 fiscal year.
