Gong, a startup that helps companies forecast revenue from potential sales, has surpassed $300 million in annual recurring revenue, the company announced Wednesday.
Since its founding in 2016, Gong has been using AI to analyze customer interactions. The addition of generation AI features in recent years has helped to drive the company's growth.
“We're seeing a lot of momentum,” Gong CEO Amit Bendov told TechCrunch.
Gong was last valued at $7.255 billion as it raised a $250 million Series E in 2021 on a deal led by Franklin Templeton with participation from Coatue, Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia, Thrive Capital and Tiger Global.
Many companies funded in 2020 and 2021 received a swell-sized rating compared to revenue, and have struggled to justify them ever since.
Assuming Gong is still valued at $7.25 billion, the latest ARR figure means that the company is currently rated at around 24x ARR, putting Gong in the same bucket as the biggest and most viewed AI companies.
However, Gong's rating could still rise compared to certain new, very rapidly growing AI startups. For example, Anysphere, the maker of AI-powered coding assistant cursors, has recently been rated 25x. Anysphere has reached ARRs of fewer singles to 100 million dollars in less than a year. (Investors usually assign a multiple of their valuation to startups that have a faster growth rate.)
Bendoff did not share Gong's revenue growth, but he said it was within the scope of “the best public Saas companies.” (The Bessemer Ventures Cloud Index shows that the annual revenue growth rate for top cloud companies is counted between 25% and 56%, among 4,500 corporate client companies, including Canva, Google, Linkedin, and Square.
Gong's current ARR and growth trajectory is likely to put the company on the path to IPO, and Bendov acknowledged that the public offering was a key milestone, but said it was not a 2025 work. ”[An IPO] It's very interesting, but not the most important thing. We are focused on building great products,” he said.
When it comes to raising another round from venture sources if not an IPO, Bendoff said the Gong still has enough cash from round 2021. “We barely touched it.”