The Seattle-based startup, Smartsheet, had set records on multiple financial and operational levels when it had raised an all-time high revenue of $144.6 million, beating expectations by a huge margin. The company’s third-quarter earnings report recorded a 46% revenue growth in FY 2021. As of February 2022, the company reported a market cap of $7.95 Billion, making it compete with giants like Asana, Monday.com, Wrike and Microsoft. As of now, Smartsheet is ranked as the world’s 1874th most valuable company in terms of its market cap.
Founded back in 2005, Smartsheet is a SaaS platform for managing and automating collaborative work, that lets people set and manage tasks and work across teams.
At present, more than 9.5 million people and 100,000 companies around the globe now use the platform. Some of the company’s mainstream customers include Cisco, Meta, Adobe and Amazon Web Services. This newly raised revenue, allows the company to build upon an already solid financial position with low cash burn, with the new funding directed to accelerate investments in product, sales, marketing, and infrastructure to support the platform’s increasing clientele.
Additionally, the company’s full-year projections for FY 2022 is expected to lie between $544 to $545 million. Smartsheet’s business model was what drove the company to success in terms of its revenue growth. As with many cloud-based services, the platform is freemium. Everyone can access documents for free, and you only pay if you want access to edit or update a Smartsheet document. This low barrier to entry, essentially lures in many users as freebies initially, some of whom eventually convert to paying customers.
The Rise of Collaborative Work Management
Over the recent years, there has been an imminent shift from using software hosted by a company itself or installed directly on your device, to products that are being sold, distributed and accessed in the cloud and Smartsheet was one of the early movers in that space.
What started back in 2005 as an alternative to the platforms like MS Excel and other spreadsheet packages on the market, has now become a big shark that focuses on offering a way for multiple people to collaborate in those documents to use them more dynamically. Especially the advent of the pandemic, made us realise the importance of collaborative work and the software that promote this approach.
Essentially used as a project management software, the platform allows much more than what it is credited for. The platform calls itself an enterprise platform that can help drive work and innovation in a company. The past several months have marked a steady flow of new entrants and high-profile acquisitions in the collaboration space to meet the shifting market needs of enterprises, which are looking for increased agility and efficiency.
One of the biggest hurdles to employee efficiency we presently face is the growing number of applications required to get work done. This includes a complex web of collaboration, productivity and business applications, which often don’t connect to each other.
As the market evolves, a need for an entirely new category of collaboration solutions will emerge that organizes work and not just tasks but provides structure and accountability across the vast array of things people have to work on. Collaborative Work Management applications enable organizations to reduce the noise so people can focus on the important work that needs to get done.
