Digital transformation — upgrading companies' legacy apps and processes with new technology — has long been a hot, high-margin business, but the pandemic has caused the market to boom.
Lockdowns and the widespread shift to working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic have led brands to turn to older technologies to modernize their organizations. According to Statista, global spending on digital transformation will reach $1.85 trillion in 2022, up more than 16% year-on-year.
WhatFix is one digital transformation company benefiting greatly from this boom: The San Jose-based company, which provides a platform for demonstrating how to use third-party software, closed a $125 million Series E round this week led by Warburg Pincus.
CEO Khadim Bhatti said the round, which also included participation from SoftBank's Vision Fund 2, values WhatFix at 50% higher than its Series D valuation in 2021. WhatFix didn't disclose its valuation, but my colleague Ingrid Lunden tracked it down to closer to $600 million. So we can assume the Series E values the company at around $900 million.
Bhati co-founded WhatFix in 2013 with Bala Kumar, whom he met while working at Huawei. The Chinese electronics giant had just opened an office in India, near its founder's hometown.
WhatFix wasn't an overnight success: Bhati and Kumar initially tried to build a business around a search engine optimization tool called Search Enabler, but ran into obstacles, including user confusion: Few customers knew how to implement the tool's suggestions, Bhati says.
“The recommendations were typically very basic, like web pages missing titles, but the customers didn't know how to fix the errors using applications like WordPress,” he told TechCrunch. “Most were small businesses with no technology know-how.”
This early failure inspired Bhatti and Kumar to pivot and take on a different challenge: teaching people how to use the new software.
Together, the two entrepreneurs built WhatFix, which leverages a database of tens of thousands of pages of documentation to provide on-screen tutorials for around 750 apps. The platform effectively “sits” on top of desktop and web apps, providing guidance for onboarding, recommended actions, and self-service support.
WhatFix's backend monitoring dashboard. Image courtesy of WhatFix
“We can provide a one-line answer from an existing knowledge repository and display it within the software application in the user’s work flow,” Batti explains.
WhatFix has more than 10 million users and 700 customers, including Shell, Microsoft, Schneider Electric, Cisco and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, according to Bhatti. The company's annual recurring revenue this year grew 4.5 times compared to last year, driven by sales of software-as-a-service plans.
WhatFix occupies a software segment called digital recruiting platforms (DAPs). DAPs are huge, with Gartner predicting that 70% of organizations will use DAPs by 2025. DAP vendors will generate roughly $646 million in combined revenue in 2022, and VC investment in DAPs grew sixfold to $470 million in the same year.
Amid increasing competition (SAP acquired DAP platform WalkMe for $1.5 billion this month), WhatFix is focused on expanding and diversifying, Bhatti said.
Since its last funding round, WhatFix has rolled out connectors for customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning software, as well as a monitoring dashboard that lets admins see app engagement metrics. (Batti says these products now account for 15% of WhatFix's revenue.) WhatFix has also doubled its already-large employee base to more than 960 people and opened new offices in Singapore, Germany, Australia, and India.
Going forward, WhatFix plans to use its total capital raised of $280 million to invest in strategic acquisitions (adding to Airim, Nittio Learn and Leap.is over the past four years) and product development. Like almost every company these days, WhatFix is keeping a close eye on the generative AI movement. Batti says the company is experimenting with automated “agents” that can take actions within specific apps, similar to robotic process automation.
“Looking forward, we expect the DAP market to evolve toward more AI-driven, personalized experiences and deeper enterprise system integration,” Bhatti said. “We currently maintain tight capital control of $265 million and maintain strong financial health with the ability to grow profitably while expanding our customer base.”
Is an IPO in WhatFix's future? Batti didn't say, but noted that funder Warburg Pincus “has a track record of taking companies to IPOs and running publicly traded businesses.” What you make of that is up to you.