Goal-setting co Ally.io raises $50 mn from Greenoaks, Tiger Global, others
Ally.io, a firm that specializes in goal-setting and business execution software, has raised $50 million in Series C funding round led by Greenoaks Capital. Tiger Global, which led the company’s Series B round, and Madrona Venture Group also joined the round. Other previous investors Accel, Addition Ventures, Founders’ Co-Op, and Vulcan Capital also participated.
With this funding, Ally.io, which has offices in Seattle and Chennai, has raised a total of $76 million. This makes the three-year-old SaaS (software-as-a-service) company the leading player in the OKR (objectives and key results) space and primed to transform how companies integrate goals with every business rhythm.
“We are shaping the way modern businesses are able to bring focus, happiness, and most importantly, purpose to the work their teams are doing,” said Vetri Vellore, CEO and founder. “A company’s goals are the starting point, but too often, they’re siloed at a leadership level, or used as a stand-alone component of a disjointed strategy. We’re bringing those goals into the executional rhythm across every aspect of the business, automating countless hours of work, and helping companies become resilient and accelerate growth.”
At a time when coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the adoption of technology among enterprises, Ally.io grew revenues by 3.3x. It added impressive additions to its client roster, from startups to well-known Fortune 100 brands across more than 80 countries. These include Nike, Overstock.com, and Dropbox. To support this rapid growth, Ally.io expanded its global team to over 130 people.
With the additional investment, Ally.io is shaping a business execution platform that closes the gaps between goals, day-to-day work, team engagement and productivity, meetings and reviews, and strategy development. The company is also rapidly expanding its global footprint, with aggressive hiring plans in its Chennai office, bolstering its strategic service offering. It is also growing its partner ecosystem with consultants around the world.
Vellore confrmed that the funding will go towards ‘aggressive’ hiring at the Chennai office, as part of the India operations where Ally.io’s total employee strength is 90. Its clients in India include The Urban Company, among others.
“The fundamental challenge for every enterprise is aligning and executing on key goals across the organization,” said Neil Mehta, managing partner of Greenoaks Capital.“Ally’s software allows organizations to define their goals, cascade these goals across an organization, integrate into the core business system to provide metric-driven progress, and collaborate efficiently to achieve results.”
The Ally.io platform brings transparency and alignment – as well as a structure to run meetings and reviews. It pulls in specialized data from each department and individual into a centralised operating system, and helps create workflows in the tools each person is already using, like Slack or Microsoft Teams.
“Ally.io is a lynchpin for how we do business across the company,” said Alex Oberg, chief of staff for Ticketmaster. “By aligning the work being done across every function and group, we’re able to move quicker and more confidently than we ever thought possible. This past year, we’ve been met with unprecedented challenges to our business, and the need to pivot quickly across the entire company. Ally.io keeps our teams tethered to the outcomes that matter while allowing us to be strategically nimble.”
Vellore and his team are seasoned leaders who built enterprise-grade products at Microsoft, Smartsheet, and Amazon. Before Ally, Vellore, an alumnus of College of Engineering, Guindy in Chennai, co-founded Chronus, a tech startup that provided mentoring and coaching software platform for employee development at large enterprises. Before that, he had spent 14 years at Microsoft where he turned around a $200-million enterprise software business and led the Visual Studio platform team and partner ecosystem.
