Pendo is a software startup that sells to other software providers a “customer guidance” software platform, which is designed to make their own software more usable by their customers.
Its platform—and the market it serves—are attracting enough attention to pave the way for Pendo to rake in some serious financial backing. Yesterday it received $25 million in Series C funding from investors, bringing its total funding to $56 million.
Salesforce.com Inc., the provider of cloud-based CRM and other forms of business software, is one of Pendo’s clients, and also one of its investors. Jonathan Pappas, a director of product at Salesforce, says in a video presentation on Pendo’s website that Pendo’s software has helped Salesforce produce more useful and user-friendly software “trial experiences,” which let prospective customers log in to test Salesforce’s software products.
Pappas shows in the video, for example, how Salesforce used Pendo technology to design more effective software trials—for example, with better instructions on how to use software features—for Desk.com, Salesforce’s cloud-based customer-support software that small businesses can use to provide service to their own customers. The Pendo technology also includes analytics that Salesforce used to test multiple versions of software trials to determine which converted the most prospective customers to buyers.
Salesforce’s venture capital arm, Salesforce Ventures, is one of several investors backing Pendo. The others are Meritech Capital Partners, Battery Ventures, Contour Venture Partners, Core Capital Partners, IDEAFund Partners and Spark Capital. Rob Ward, general partner of Meritech, will join Pendo’s board.
Another client, WebPT, specializes in designing and selling software under a software-as-a-service model for managing medical records for the physical therapy industry. “Our software has to serve a number of different roles in each practice,” says Bradley LaFave, product marketing manager at WebPT. “As a SaaS product without contracts, we have to show value every day to our members to maintain our over 99% retention rate. This is where Pendo comes in. Pendo helps us truly understand and improve the experience we deliver.” SaaS customers access through a web browser software that a vendor hosts on the internet, paying for it on a subscription basis.
Pendo’s other clients include procurement software provider Coupa Software; healthcare products and software distributor Henry Schein; enterprise management software firm Infor; and Optimizely, a provider of software designed to help companies design and test web content personalized to the customers’ interests.
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