Whatfix raises $32M in Series C funding to drive digital adoption of enterprise apps

Enterprises spend billions of dollars on various enterprise applications and employee training, yet industry research shows that 85 percent of business executives are challenged with user adoption of new technologies. While a typical enterprise uses over 300 cloud applications, not all of them are used to their full potential. Enter Whatfix, a San Jose, California-based Digital Adoption Solutions (“DAS”) provider created to help enterprises drive digital adoption, realize user productivity, and elevate user experience across enterprise applications.

Today, Whatfix announced it has raised $32 million in Series C funding led by Sequoia Capital India, with participation from existing investors Eight Roads Ventures-a global proprietary investment firm backed by Fidelity, F-Prime Capital, and Cisco Investments. Whatfix plans to use the fresh capital infusion to drive product development and to address the growing demands for DAS by accelerating the company’s expansion into markets such as Europe and Australia.

Founded in 2014 by Khadim Batti and Varakumar Namburu, Whatfix is a Digital Adoption Solution that disrupts Application Training, Learning, and Support content by providing Contextual, Interactive, Real-Time, and Autonomous user guidance- driving additional adoption and productivity gains. Whatfix has a proven record of increasing employee productivity by 35%, reducing training time and costs by 60%, reducing employee case tickets by 50% and increasing application data accuracy by 20%. Whatfix also has offices in San Francisco, Bangalore, London and Melbourne.

With this latest round of funding, Whatfix plans to further invest in product innovation with enhanced functionalities that unify the employee experience and digital journey across desktop, mobile and web applications; simplify enterprise-wide search across fragmented content repositories; and increase user productivity via workflow automation, personalization and BOT based data entry.

“As the future of work evolves, enterprises must invest in Digital Adoption now to prepare for the next wave in the digital workplace. Mainstream employees and alternative workforce will need to be digitally savvy, stay focused on key digital activities, use BOTs to enter data and perform routine tasks, re-skill themselves by self-learning in the flow of work, and be comfortable acting on hyper-personalized guidance,” said Khadim Batti, CEO and Co-Founder at Whatfix. “Personalized in-app guidance, automation and quick discovery will help enterprises and their workers be more productive and reduce cognitive overload,” added Batti.

“This latest funding will help us to expand our product offerings globally and continue to help enterprises realize the full value of their digitization effort,” said Vara Kumar, Co-Founder and CTO at Whatfix. “Whatfix will continue to hire across all functions and geographies and provide the leading digital adoption platform that enables clients to drive adoption across applications, browsers and devices; is easy to deploy; has the most open ecosystem and is truly secure.”

“Our journey with Whatfix has been a true partnership. We continue to work together to find ways to improve the experience of our customers using Whatfix’s versatile software. They continue to put us, their customers, first so that we are able to focus on our business – putting our customers first,” Elliott Tucker, HP B2B eCommerce Process Lead.

Whatfix now joins Sequoia Capital India’s venture-backed family of tier-one enterprise SaaS players that are already embraced in enterprise tech stacks.

“Software is penetrating the deepest crevices of enterprise workflows at an unprecedented pace. Enterprise software spend is $450B+ globally growing 9% y-o-y. A new category of Digital Adoption Solutions (DAS) is fast emerging to ensure user adoption keeps pace with software purchase”, said Tejeshwi Sharma, Principal, Sequoia Capital India LLP. “Whatfix has been instrumental in shaping the DAS category by innovating products aimed at democratizing adoption and efficient use of software products. Khadim and Vara have taken a customer-first approach, a reflection of their deep understanding and empathy for the end users. Sequoia India is stoked to be joining them in this category creation journey,” he added.

According to the Gartner Research, “Digital Adoption Solutions are used to improve the adoption of multiple tools across the organization. The software walks a user through business processes across multiple products. It provides consistent user experience, eliminating in some cases manual entry. It supplies visually clear paths to complete tasks. It enables sellers to be onboarded faster and improve productivity. Sales is a key use case but this technology can apply to other areas in an organization as well as to external products sold by an organization,” says Melissa Hilbert, Sr. Director Analyst, in the Gartner “Increase Sales Productivity With Digital Adoption Solutions”, May 21, 2019 (Gartner subscription required).

“The Whatfix Digital Adoption Platform is designed to provide personalized training for workers within web applications. The solution delivers learning content in various formats, and it includes real-time guidance. It can also integrate with an organization’s learning management system (LMS) to create interactive training programs,” said author Julie Hiipakka, Vice President, Learning Research LeaderBersin, Deloitte Consulting LLP, in her recent report Learning in The Flow of Work Solutions, released in November 2019.

“Whatfix’s digital adoption platform is quickly establishing itself as an important pillar to accelerate user adoption of technology stacks of leading global enterprises,” said Shweta Bhatia, Partner at Eight Roads Ventures. “We are proud to be their partner and are excited to see how Whatfix continues to bring innovative new solutions to revolutionize software adoption and the future of work,” she added.

Whatfix currently has 230 employees across six global offices. Whatfix has over 500 global customers, including Automation Anywhere, Experian, Grifols, REG Services Group, Reed Specialist Recruitment, Sentry Financial Services, Cardinal Health Canada, DaVita Healthcare, BMC Software Inc., and more.