WhatFix raises a whopping $125M for its in-app user guides
WhatFix, a company developing a platform that guides people through using web and desktop apps, has closed a $125 million equity funding round.
Digital transformation — upgrading a company’s legacy apps and processes with new tech — has long been a buzzy and lucrative business. But the pandemic supercharged the market.
Covid pandemic lockdowns and the widespread move to work-from-home spurred brands relying on old technology to modernize their organizations. According to Statista, worldwide spending on digital transformation reached $1.85 trillion in 2022, up more than 16% from the previous year.
WhatFix is among the digital transformation firms that have benefited enormously from the boom. The San Jose-based company, which offers a platform that demos how to use third-party software, this week closed a $125 million Series E round led by Warburg Pincus.
CEO Khadim Batti says that the round, which also had participation from SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, values WhatFix at a figure 50% higher than its Series D valuation in 2021. WhatFix never disclosed that valuation, but my colleague Ingrid Lunden ascertained that it was close to $600 million. We can assume, then, that the Series E brings the company’s valuation to around $900 million.
Batti co-launched WhatFix with Vara Kumar in 2013 after the pair met while working at Huawei. The Chinese electronics giant had just opened an office in India, near the founders’ home cities.
WhatFix wasn’t an overnight success. Batti and Kumar originally tried building a business around a search engine optimization tool called Search Enabler, but roadblocks kept arising — including user confusion. Few customers knew how to implement the tool’s suggestions, Batti says.
“The recommendations were generally quite basic, such as the webpage not having a title, but customers didn’t know how to use applications like WordPress to correct the error,” he told TechCrunch. “Most were small businesses without technology know-how.”
Out of this early failure sprang inspiration. Batti and Kumar decided to pivot to try their hands at a different challenge: teaching people how to use new software.
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