- The productivity-tool startup Monday.com on Tuesday announced a $150 million Series D round of funding.
- The round, led by Sapphire Ventures, valued the unprofitable company at $1.9 billion, according to a source with knowledge of the deal.
- The funding comes during a fever pitch of excitement around workplace-productivity tools, with the video-conferencing company Zoom and the chat app Slack outperforming expectations in recent public debuts.
- The funds are meant to help the company achieve aggressive growth targets while it evaluates whether to go public, the Monday.com cofounders Eran Zinman and Roy Mann told Business Insider.
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Turns out a case of the Mondays can be worth more than $1 billion.
Monday.com, a workplace-productivity startup, on Tuesday announced it closed $150 million in Series D funding led by Sapphire Ventures. A source with knowledge of the deal said the round valued the 7-year-old startup at $1.9 billion.
"Every round nowadays is competitive," Sapphire Ventures' CEO and managing director, Nino Marakovic, told Business Insider. "It was a premium valuation for a premium company, and that's what happens nowadays."
Even with its newly minted unicorn status, Monday.com has yet to achieve profitability, according to its cofounder and CEO, Roy Mann.
"We are not aiming at profitability; we are aiming at growth," Mann told Business Insider. "I will say that we are one of the most cash-flow-efficient companies out there. We are very mindful about how we spend money, and that is a comfort for investors."
Monday.com offers its users a wide variety of automation and integration tools, similar to products like Zapier and Notion. But Mann and his cofounder Eran Zinman, the company's chief technology officer, took a page out of Slack's sales strategy by targeting employees as users instead of selling to a company's IT team after experiencing the challenges of managing quickly growing teams during their own stints at separate startups.
"Most of the tools we use in our personal lives are slick and cool because it's consumer stuff," Mann said. "When you come to business software, they are clunky, slow, have a lot of clicks, and are not appealing. Essentially, the UI, ease of use, and empowerment of the user comes second all the time because it's sold to the business."
Monday.com's biggest selling point, according to Zinman, is in the flexibility it gives users to create their own tools and processes as an organization scales from tens of employees to over a hundred.
"When we were first building Monday.com, we spoke with a lot of managers to get a sense of how they manage the team and tools they would use, and it seemed like everyone had a secret Excel file that they used," Zinman said. "Excel is not meant to be used for management, but the fact that you can customize it to make it make sense to you is very powerful, so that's how we built the company."
The funding comes during a fever pitch of excitement around workplace-productivity tools, with the video-conferencing company Zoom and the chat app Slack outperforming expectations in recent public debuts. Mann and Zinman told Business Insider that while they now had the funds to explore new product offerings and markets, they were keeping one eye on the public markets.
"Looking at the growth ahead of us, it made a lot of sense to do another round right now," Zinman told Business Insider. "Another option is to potentially go public, which we have no concrete plans to do so right now, but the opportunity is so huge and that's definitely an option whenever we feel the time is right. This round gives us the flexibility to do that."
According to Mann, Monday.com has customers in more than 200 industries including plane manufacturers, construction crews, and hospitality teams. The 265-person team is split between New York and Tel Aviv, Israel, with plans to expand in either the United States or Europe and double headcount over the next year, Mann said.
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