Startups

ClickUp raises $400M at a $4B valuation to expand its all-in-one workplace productivity platform to Europe

Comment

Image of office workers holding up rainbow puzzle pieces.
Image Credits: claudenakagawa (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Companies like Slack and Asana stormed into the world of tech to steal a march on incumbents like Microsoft in providing a new wave of point solutions to make it easier for workers respectively to chat with each other, plan projects and more. Now another startup is announcing a massive round of funding for a platform that it believes has its own unique role to play in disrupting enterprise IT: by providing a single, all-in-one solution covering various aspects of workplace productivity.

ClickUp, which provides a set of tools that lets its users tackle project management, document collaboration, spreadsheets, chat and goals from a single platform — a little like Workday but for productivity — has raised $400 million, a Series C funding that the company confirmed values it at $4 billion post-money.

ClickUp said that this is, to date, the single-largest Series C in the workplace productivity market (others like Slack have raised bigger single rounds… so still room to grow!). Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global are co-leading the round, with Lightspeed Venture Partners and Meritech Capital Partners also participating. Craft Ventures and Georgian Partners are among its earlier backers; the company has now raised $535 million.

ClickUp — based out of San Diego — plans to use the funding to double down on growth in Europe, with 600 new jobs and a new HQ set for Ireland that will handle R&D, operations and sales. The company counts the likes of Google (yes, the company behind its own productivity tools), McDonald’s, Booking.com and Netflix among its large enterprise customers. In all, ClickUp is being used by 800,000 teams — up from just 200,000 a year ago.

A significant proportion of ClickUp’s customers, some 40%, are already based outside of the U.S, with a large part of those users in Europe — some 275,000 teams in all, the company said — hence its interest in focusing more deeply in the region. It will also include localised versions of its platform for France, Germany and Spain, the company said.

The shift to cloud services and a rising appetite from knowledge workers to use tools in the office that work just as intuitively as their “fun” consumer mobile apps has led to a veritable revolution in the world of enterprise software.

Fueled by venture capital, startups have built out substantial businesses tackling different aspects of what “workplace productivity” can constitute, from tools to improve how to perform in a specific job like sales (Slack being now owned by the giant in that space, Salesforce), through to more specific workplace functionality like organising one’s calendar or meetings, writing and collaborating on documents, creating and managing a project, talking to each other about specific work tasks, and so much more. And big tech companies have not been outside of the game, either. Microsoft and the rest have all stepped up with their own takes on the same problems.

But all this has also created a new kind of productivity problem in the process. Enterprises are often now dealing with a much wider range of apps in their typical workflow. This predicament is not small: it has cost, efficiency, management, security and attention implications in varying degrees.

The solution here is pretty obvious: move back to all-in-one solutions that take out some of the noise and make it easier to share and hand off work throughout the lifecycle of productivity. It’s something that Microsoft, of course, is already addressing, as are others. But in the wider scheme of things, sometimes building a new set of tools from scratch can yield a much fresher, and better, result.

“ClickUp’s sole purpose has always been to make the world more productive. Time is our most valuable resource and we are committed to giving people more time to focus on what matters most to them,” says Zeb Evans, CEO and founder of ClickUp, in a statement. “We believe software should make people more productive and efficient. I’m thrilled about our next chapter and accelerating the innovations that deliver on this promise to our customers.”

Investors love almost nothing more than a fast-growing startup — and this one definitely fits the bill.

“ClickUp’s unique offering in the market has fueled their rise as one of the fastest-growing SaaS startups in the world. Their strong growth, product adoption, and customer retention reflect the tremendous value they’re providing to businesses looking to drive greater productivity and efficiency,” said David George, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, in a statement. “ClickUp is synonymous with the future of work, and we’re thrilled to partner with a company that has shown such a strong commitment to its users and product. We look forward to building a more productive world together.”

More TechCrunch

After Apple loosened its App Store guidelines to permit game emulators, the retro game emulator Delta — an app 10 years in the making — hit the top of the…

Adobe comes after indie game emulator Delta for copying its logo

Meta is once again taking on its competitors by developing a feature that borrows concepts from others — in this case, BeReal and Snapchat. The company is developing a feature…

Meta’s latest experiment borrows from BeReal’s and Snapchat’s core ideas

Welcome to Startups Weekly! We’ve been drowning in AI news this week, with Google’s I/O setting the pace. And Elon Musk rages against the machine.

Startups Weekly: It’s the dawning of the age of AI — plus,  Musk is raging against the machine

IndieBio’s Bay Area incubator is about to debut its 15th cohort of biotech startups. We took special note of a few, which were making some major, bordering on ludicrous, claims…

IndieBio’s SF incubator lineup is making some wild biotech promises

YouTube TV has announced that its multiview feature for watching four streams at once is now available on Android phones and tablets. The Android launch comes two months after YouTube…

YouTube TV’s ‘multiview’ feature is now available on Android phones and tablets

Featured Article

Two Santa Cruz students uncover security bug that could let millions do their laundry for free

CSC ServiceWorks provides laundry machines to thousands of residential homes and universities, but the company ignored requests to fix a security bug.

17 hours ago
Two Santa Cruz students uncover security bug that could let millions do their laundry for free

OpenAI’s Superalignment team, responsible for developing ways to govern and steer “superintelligent” AI systems, was promised 20% of the company’s compute resources, according to a person from that team. But…

OpenAI created a team to control ‘superintelligent’ AI — then let it wither, source says

TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is just around the corner, and the buzz is palpable. But what if we told you there’s a chance for you to not just attend, but also…

Harness the TechCrunch Effect: Host a Side Event at Disrupt 2024

Decks are all about telling a compelling story and Goodcarbon does a good job on that front. But there’s important information missing too.

Pitch Deck Teardown: Goodcarbon’s $5.5M seed deck

Slack is making it difficult for its customers if they want the company to stop using its data for model training.

Slack under attack over sneaky AI training policy

A Texas-based company that provides health insurance and benefit plans disclosed a data breach affecting almost 2.5 million people, some of whom had their Social Security number stolen. WebTPA said…

Healthcare company WebTPA discloses breach affecting 2.5 million people

Featured Article

Microsoft dodges UK antitrust scrutiny over its Mistral AI stake

Microsoft won’t be facing antitrust scrutiny in the U.K. over its recent investment into French AI startup Mistral AI.

19 hours ago
Microsoft dodges UK antitrust scrutiny over its Mistral AI stake

Ember has partnered with HSBC in the U.K. so that the bank’s business customers can access Ember’s services from their online accounts.

Embedded finance is still trendy as accounting automation startup Ember partners with HSBC UK

Kudos uses AI to figure out consumer spending habits so it can then provide more personalized financial advice, like maximizing rewards and utilizing credit effectively.

Kudos lands $10M for an AI smart wallet that picks the best credit card for purchases

The EU’s warning comes after Microsoft failed to respond to a legally binding request for information that focused on its generative AI tools.

EU warns Microsoft it could be fined billions over missing GenAI risk info

The prospects for troubled banking-as-a-service startup Synapse have gone from bad to worse this week after a United States Trustee filed an emergency motion on Wednesday.  The trustee is asking…

A US Trustee wants troubled fintech Synapse to be liquidated via Chapter 7 bankruptcy, cites ‘gross mismanagement’

U.K.-based Seraphim Space is spinning up its 13th accelerator program, with nine participating companies working on a range of tech from propulsion to in-space manufacturing and space situational awareness. The…

Seraphim’s latest space accelerator welcomes nine companies

OpenAI has reached a deal with Reddit to use the social news site’s data for training AI models. In a blog post on OpenAI’s press relations site, the company said…

OpenAI inks deal to train AI on Reddit data

X users will now be able to discover posts from new Communities that are trending directly from an Explore tab within the section.

X pushes more users to Communities

For Mark Zuckerberg’s 40th birthday, his wife got him a photoshoot. Zuckerberg gives the camera a sly smile as he sits amid a carefully crafted re-creation of his childhood bedroom.…

Mark Zuckerberg’s makeover: Midlife crisis or carefully crafted rebrand?

Strava announced a slew of features, including AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, a new ‘family’ subscription plan, dark mode and more.

Strava taps AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, unveils ‘family’ plan, dark mode and more

We all fall down sometimes. Astronauts are no exception. You need to be in peak physical condition for space travel, but bulky space suits and lower gravity levels can be…

Astronauts fall over. Robotic limbs can help them back up.

Microsoft will launch its custom Cobalt 100 chips to customers as a public preview at its Build conference next week, TechCrunch has learned. In an analyst briefing ahead of Build,…

Microsoft’s custom Cobalt chips will come to Azure next week

What a wild week for transportation news! It was a smorgasbord of news that seemed to touch every sector and theme in transportation.

Tesla keeps cutting jobs and the feds probe Waymo

Sony Music Group has sent letters to more than 700 tech companies and music streaming services to warn them not to use its music to train AI without explicit permission.…

Sony Music warns tech companies over ‘unauthorized’ use of its content to train AI

Winston Chi, Butter’s founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that “most parties, including our investors and us, are making money” from the exit.

GrubMarket buys Butter to give its food distribution tech an AI boost

The investor lawsuit is related to Bolt securing a $30 million personal loan to Ryan Breslow, which was later defaulted on.

Bolt founder Ryan Breslow wants to settle an investor lawsuit by returning $37 million worth of shares

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, launched an enterprise version of the prominent social network in 2015. It always seemed like a stretch for a company built on a consumer…

With the end of Workplace, it’s fair to wonder if Meta was ever serious about the enterprise

X, formerly Twitter, turned TweetDeck into X Pro and pushed it behind a paywall. But there is a new column-based social media tool in town, and it’s from Instagram Threads.…

Meta Threads is testing pinned columns on the web, similar to the old TweetDeck

As part of 2024’s Accessibility Awareness Day, Google is showing off some updates to Android that should be useful to folks with mobility or vision impairments. Project Gameface allows gamers…

Google expands hands-free and eyes-free interfaces on Android