Today, Lightspeed’s Growth Team is excited to announce our Series C investment in ClickUp, the all-in-one productivity platform.
Productivity software has long been in vogue. It’s a space we know and love as investors given the underlying tailwinds around accelerated cloud adoption, agile development, and work-from-home induced alignment gaps. It’s also a space filled with cacophony and competition, so we carry some skepticism whenever we meet a newer entrant.
Despite being less than four years old, ClickUp broke through that noise in strides by turning modern software development on its head. When Zeb Evans was building his last startup, he found his engineering team using a project management tool to manage development, his marketing team using a similar albeit more simplified tool to manage marketing campaigns, internal chat tools to communicate about work being tracked in those solutions, and whiteboarding related to projects that fed into them. Why so many different tools? Because there was no other option. Software development typically follows a best of breed approach, where the only way to disrupt an incumbent is by putting all your resources behind building a more superior product that meets a specific, nuanced need. The notion of “bundling” described the natural evolution of the incumbent, while “unbundling” was the necessary path for the upstart.
Zeb threw that framework out the window and discovered the foundational principle behind what became ClickUp — all productivity tools at work are tied in essence to a given project or task. If your product serves as the source of truth for project management, you can naturally extend into communicating about projects, ideating projects, tracking time spent on said projects, collaborating on documents associated with those projects, and so on.
The ClickUp team set out on the audacious path of integrating all of your work into one unified platform. Their secret sauce is their untethered, borderline irrational ambition and their iterative pace of software development. They launch meaningful product releases every Friday, often before they’re fully baked, and listen closely to customer feedback while iterating on future releases. Their ethos from Day One was to serve both 2 person and 20,000 person companies with equal dexterity, which they’ve accomplished without compromising simplicity for flexibility or scalability. And the proof is in the pudding. Whether you look at their breakneck top line growth or the 90%+ customers who are using three or more of their products — their contrarian approach is no longer contrarian, it’s simply right.
Perhaps the real underlying reason we’re making this investment…ClickUp recently relocated their HQ to San Diego, which happens to be America’s finest city and my hometown. They now mark Lightspeed’s second investment in the area with more to come.
Lightspeed is thrilled to partner with Zeb, Alex, Tommy and the rest of the team as they set out to build the next $100B software company.
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