My last blog post was at the end of last summer, when we achieved a “Hat Trick” of key milestones. We had surpassed a thousand clients, made the Inc. 500 for the first time, and our AdWords Performance Grader passed $2.5 billion in unique spend analyzed. In the last few months, we’ve achieved a few more key milestones. Our team is now 100+ people strong, and we recently surpassed the $10 million in annual recurring revenue mark.
Today, I’m excited to tell you about another big milestone on our journey to build the best search marketing software for small and medium-sized businesses. We have just raised $12 million of fresh funding, led by Baird Capital of Chicago. This is the biggest fundraising round WordStream has ever done! As exciting as things have been in the past few years, our team is pumped about what the future holds.
What are we going to use the $12M for?
- Innovation: We have a wealth of ideas on where to take our product offering. Many of these ideas are fueled by customer feedback. At the end of last year, we released our Landing Pages & Leads offering. Just this month we released Call Tracking, and we have a number of key initiatives in our pipeline. This funding is going to allow us to expand our Product team, hire more engineering resources, and accelerate the features and capabilities of our software to make it even more awesome.
- Free Tools: We’re known throughout the industry for our groundbreaking free AdWords Performance Grader. The Grader now analyzes three quarters of a billion dollars every single month! This staggering volume is beyond anything we could have imagined, and it keeps growing! Earlier this year, we added a free Landing Page Grader to help small and medium-sized businesses get insights about their lead conversion funnel. With this fresh funding, you can expect continued evolution of our existing free tools as well as a few new surprises.
We have a lot more planned. This is just the tip of the iceberg. If you have areas you would like to see us focus on, please comment below, or pass along your thoughts to your key WordStream contact.
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Here I am toasting the team on our recent harbor cruise
I want to extend a big thank you to our clients, many of which have been with us for a long time and have provided valuable feedback and guidance along the way that helped to make this round of funding possible. Thanks also to our tremendous staff at WordStream—we have a great team filled with smart, passionate people that want to make a difference. Lastly, thank you to our early investors, Sigma Partners and Egan Managed Capital, which provided the initial capital and guidance to build the company that we have today.
Big things ahead!
Ralph
This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.
