There's an old saying (well, not that old) that software is eating the world. Of note is the latest round of financing of a software company known as Monday.com.
The workplace software provider is one of the faster growing of these platforms, just announced a $150 million round of equity funding — a huge raise that points both to its success so far, and the opportunity ahead for the wider collaboration space (virtual), specifically around better team communication and team management. The future, it appears, isn't really about collaborative physical spaces and furniture.
As you might have imagined, workplace collaboration platforms have become a crucial cornerstone of the modern office: workers’ lives are guided by software and what we do on our computers, and collaboration tools provide a way for us to let each other know what we’re working on, and how we’re doing it, in a format that’s (at best) easy to use without too much distraction from the work itself. And of course, the platforms allow work to occur almost anywhere.
The Series D funding — led by Sapphire Ventures, with Hamilton Lane, HarbourVest Partners, ION Crossover Partners and Vintage Investment Partners also participating — is coming in at an expected valuation of $1.9 billion, or nearly the exact same market valuation that Wall Street places on Steelcase.
Monday.com now has 80,000 organizations as customers, up from a mere 35,000 a year ago, with the number of actual employees within those organizations numbering as high as 4,000 employees, or as little as two, spanning some 200 industry verticals, including a fair number of companies that are non-technical in their nature. The client list, not unlike that of office furniture makers, includes Carlsberg, Discovery Channel, Phillips, Hulu and WeWork and a number of Fortune 500 companies.
But while Monday.com's progress to date is impressive (certainly no start-up office furniture maker has grown to be that valuable in 5 years - or even 50 years), it pales in comparison to Slack, another workplace collaboration software platform. Slack today has a market cap of $16 billion, making it more valuable than all of the publicly-held office furniture makers (and the private makers as well) put together.
Indeed, software has eaten the world.