50 million for Showpad
This week will mark a historic capital round for Showpad. Together with Dawn Capital and Hummingbird Ventures, the American venture capitalist Insight Venture Partners is injecting no less than 50 million dollars in the content activation platform of the Ghent company. The extra resources will be used to reinforce Showpad’s leading position, to accelerate the growth of its sales and marketing teams and to expand its platform.
It is Showpad's third large capital round, which was founded in 2011 in Ghent by Pieterjan Bouten and Louis Jonckheere. The financial inflow is the logical consequence of the exponential growth of Showpad. The last four years the company more than doubled its revenue each year. The new investor in Showpad, Insight Venture Partners, is not just any investor. Insight manages approximately EUR 13 billion in assets and has already acquired an interest in technology companies such as Alibaba, Twitter, Tumblr, Flipboard, Hootsuite and Zenefits.
With hundreds of customers globally, including BNP Paribas, Coca-Cola Enterprises, Atlas Copco, Johnson & Johnson, Kimberly-Clark, Audi, Intel and KPN, Showpad helps each company to highlight the potential of its content. Today the platform’s main focus is still on improving the efficiency and productivity of sales and marketing teams. However, currently new applications are being developed to address the broader content challenge each company faces today.
"Analysts estimate that 60 to 70% of all company content (presentations, brochures, videos etc. for sales support and training, among other things) is never used, largely because it is untraceable or is simply irrelevant. We have developed Showpad to solve that problem and to make it the only platform increasing the efficiency of company content by making it incredibly easy to find, use, share and analyse the right content," says Showpad co-CEO and co-founder, Pieterjan Bouten.
Moreover, this week the Ghent company is launching a renewed integration tool for Salesforce and a Gmail plug-in which must ensure that users can retrieve the right files more easily from their mailbox.
Showpad is the world's leading Content Activation Platform. It started as a producer of software mainly intended for sales personnel of companies. Initially the focus was on a tablet application providing the salesperson will all the tools to serve his/her clients; however the start-up has increasingly moved to software working on as many platforms as possible and is also aimed at other departments, such as the human resources department or maintenance personnel. Currently, Showpad activates the content of over 850 companies. The company has 2 head offices in San Francisco and Ghent, and offices in Portland and London. Later this year another office will be opened in New York and there are plans to launch operations in Asia. Showpad employs 170 people (about seventy in the US, 90 in Ghent and 10 in the United Kingdom). Last year the company generated a turnover of 10 million dollars, a number it aims to double this year.