Quebec-based startup Coveo closes on $172 million to help companies tailor and deliver digital experiences to their audiences

Coveo, a Quebec-based tech startup that builds AI-powered search and personalization services, has raised $172 million  (CA$227 Million) in a investment round to empower companies to tailor every experience to an audience of one. The round, which was led by OMERS Private Equity, now values the company at more than $1 billion. Other backers include existing investors and other financial institutions including Evergreen Coast Capital, Elliott Management’s Menlo Park, California-based private equity affiliate, FSTQ, and IQ.

Founded in 2005 by Laurent Simoneau, Marc Sanfacon, and Richard Tessier, Coveo designs intelligent enterprise search and predictive insights platform that helps businesses to unlock the power of search to maximize performance. Coveo is also embedded in many leading business applications from vendors including Salesforce, ServiceNow, Sitecore, Dynamics and more. Coveo partners with the world’s largest enterprise technology players and has more than 1,500 activations in mid-to-large sized global organizations across multiple industries.

Coveo’s platform securely connects and unifies information from across on-premise and cloud applications and automatically suggests relevant information, experts, products, and services to customers as they self-serve and to employees as they work, enabling businesses to harness the full value of their IP and empower their workers with the unified and secure knowledge access.

“Companies from Formica to Tableau see us as a key platform to meet the challenges of doing business in today’s data-driven AI-takes-all economy,” said Louis Tetu, CEO and Chairman of Coveo. “We believe that to serve a million people you need to deliver a million unique experiences. We help businesses globally become digital experience leaders and compete against digital giants, using data and AI to deliver the personalized, predictive and profitable experiences expected in today’s market.”

Coveo enables more than 500 of the world’s most admired companies to deliver effortless experiences that deliver real business value: from improving a top 10 retailer’s revenue per visit by 8 percent; to saving Tableau over $18M a year through enabling client self-service; to improving customer service agent efficiency at Medallia by 34 percent. Coveo offers AI solutions to dynamically serve relevance and recommendations at scale across every digital journey, and is uniquely positioned to enable companies to be relevant, coherent, and optimize profitability at every interaction. This is highly valuable for web, commerce, service, and workplace applications across the enterprise, equipping enterprises to thrive in today’s competitive landscape.

“We believe that Coveo is the market leader in leveraging data and AI to personalize at scale,” said Mark Shulgan, Managing Director and Head of Growth Equity at OMERS. “Coveo fits our investment thesis precisely: an A-plus leadership team with deep expertise in enterprise SaaS, a Fortune 1000 customer base who deeply love the product, and a track record of high growth in a market worth over $100 billion. This makes Coveo a highly-coveted asset. We are glad to be partnering to scale this business.”