Marketo’s Growth Continues On Hockey Stick Curve With Customer Count Passing 850, First $1M Deal
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In skyrocketing to more than 700 companies in its first two years in business, Marketo’s customer base has been made up primarily of small to mid-sized organizations. Based on the results of the recently wrapped quarter, Marketo is now making inroads with enterprise customers as well.
Marketo announced its Q4 results, during which the company increased its customer count to more than 850, signing 80 new customers in the month of December alone. In closing out 2010, Marketo reported it had doubled its customer count during the year and saw revenue growth of 315% year over year.
The company also saw its client roster expand within the enterprise sector, with nine new customers at corporations with revenue over $1 billion, the company’s first million dollar deal and its fourth deal at a Fortune 15 company.
To support its rapid growth, Marketo said it added 100 new employees including customer-facing support and service employees by 150% and expanding engineering capacity by more than 50%.
As automation tools are now being leveraged across various verticals, Marketo’s VP of Marketing Jon Miller pointed out that enterprise customers are utilizing automation capabilities for more sophisticated marketing needs, particularly because of the complexity of their organizations. Miller added that sales teams continue to be more involved in deploying automation tools. “Marketing automation is about improving your revenue,” he said. “That’s a function that marketers care intensely about, but so does everybody else [within organizations.]”
The focus on the area of Revenue Performance Management continues to gain traction among prospective buyers, Miller affirmed. “The revenue dialogue is a little bit more on the forefront than it was a year ago,” he said. “We’re coming out of a recession and people are thinking a little bit more about growth than they were a year ago.”
While there has been buzz around IPOs and mergers and acquisitions in the automation space, Miller said there is no rush for Marketo to tap into the public markets at this time. “An IPO is just a financing event,” Miller said. “We don’t know what capital markets will look like in the future, so rather than speculate on any given timing, we’re just looking to build a really big successful business that has such an extraordinarily high growth rate that we’ll be able to command a premium valuation, when the time is right.”
However, Miller did point out that Marketo’s growth rate compares favorably to other publicly traded SaaS companies. “If you look at our revenue growth rate, last year to this year, we are growing faster than NetSuite, Omniture, Constant Contact and other public SaaS companies grew at a similar point in their lifecycle as a company,” Miller said. “That’s projected to continue forward.”
In 2010, Marketo raised $35 million in additional funding, including a Series E round led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP).