The Climb to $200 Million: Reflecting on Loopio’s Biggest Milestone

Today, Loopio announced the biggest milestone in our history: we’ve partnered with Sumeru Equity Partners and Affiliates (SEP) to supercharge our next stage of growth! This partnership includes a $200 million (USD) investment in Loopio, combined with industry-leading strategic support from SEP. Most importantly, it’s a long-term commitment to our mission of building the market-leading and most-loved RFP response software.

Many technology companies dream of getting to this position. To say we’re excited about what this means for our team and our customers is an understatement.

To commemorate this milestone, I want to reflect on how Loopio arrived at this point in our journey, and what this investment means for the future of our business.

Unlocking Incredible Growth, Together

Back in 2014, Loopio was a bootstrapped company started by three friends (Matt York, Jafar Owainati, and myself, Zak Hemraj). After struggling throughout our careers with the manual, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks required to answer RFPs, we started dreaming up a way to make the entire response process more efficient for all organizations.

Loopio’s three co-founders (L-R): Matt York, Jafar Owainati, and Zak Hemraj.

Soon after launching our solution, we acquired our first few customers and used their feedback to strengthen the platform. I’ll forever be grateful to these companies for putting their trust in a young startup and giving us an opportunity to make an impact. In 2015, we started hiring a team to help us grow. Three years later, we reached 50 employees with 300 customers. This brought us to one of our biggest inflection points as a company: raising our Series A of $9 million (USD) with OpenView in 2018.

OpenView’s support and guidance over the last three years helped us scale to where we are today: serving 1,000+ world-leading brands and becoming one of the fastest-growing companies in North America. We couldn’t be more grateful for this partnership.

If you’re wondering how a solution for this often overlooked problem has grown so quickly, here are a few reasons:

1. RFPs, Security Questionnaires, and Due Diligence Questionnaires happen at almost every company. They also influence upwards of 35% of sales revenue—meaning they’re critical to a company’s success. Our solution has a large impact on response efficiency and revenue growth.
2. We’ve stayed deeply focused on creating the best RFP response software. We listen closely to feedback from our customers and the market, and then we build our solutions based on those needs and pains. This customer-centricity is easy to lose as you scale, but we’ve done everything in our power to maintain and strengthen this muscle.
3. Most importantly, we’ve got a stellar team. At Loopio, our mission has always been to create an environment where people can do their best work—because when you take care of your team and help them grow their careers, they take care of your customers and help you grow your business. Our employees (who we affectionately call ‘Loopers’) care deeply about solving customer problems and mastering their craft. We’d be nowhere without their curiosity, candor, grit, and support.

Loopers celebrating a recent award win for our corporate culture.

What the Future Holds for Loopio’s Product, Customers, and Team

Thanks to the support of our team, customers, and investors, we were in a strong position at the end of 2020. Despite the uncertainties of last year, the RFP software market continued to grow at a rapid-fire pace—especially in a remote world, where collaboration and communication are top priorities for every company.

To keep up with the demand for solutions like Loopio, we felt it was the right time to hit the ‘accelerate’ button on our product development and market expansion.

We chose to partner with SEP for our next stage of growth. From our first conversation, the SEP team has stood out for their intelligence, reputation, and thoughtfulness. They have a longstanding history of investing in and partnering with market-leading companies like Blackline, Ceros, MDSL, and SocialChorus.

This partnership feels like a true extension of our team for two main reasons:

• Market knowledge and experience. SEP has a passionate, product-focused team with a deep understanding of the RFP response software market. And they’ve helped companies similar in size to ours grow exponentially.
• Alignment with our core values. SEP’s corporate values align with our own. In particular, they believe that people and culture matter deeply to a company’s success.

Here’s a high-level look at how we plan to use this investment for Loopio’s next phase of growth.

1. Continuing to Revolutionize RFP Technology

We’re excited to accelerate the development of our RFP response software—especially in the areas of time-saving automation and further enhancing our platform’s machine learning capabilities.

We will develop more reporting and insights tools so that sales and proposal teams can continue to enhance their performance and drive even greater efficiency.

We’ll also explore more collaboration tools. This is especially important since 60% of RFP teams reported working from home for the first time in 2020, and remote collaboration has brought some new challenges to RFP responders.

2. Bringing Response Efficiency to More Teams & Companies

Loopio’s platform is used by more than 1,000 world-leading companies like DocuSign, Siemens, and McGraw Hill. This investment will help us continue to expand our presence and bring our solution to new markets and companies around the world.

Since we’ll be broadening our go-to-market strategy, we’ll also be expanding our customer-facing teams. Our goal is to continue delivering the stellar experience that our customers love—no matter how much we grow.

3. Building Up a World-Class Team

Hiring the best talent is essential for our next phase of growth. By the end of 2021, Loopio plans to expand our employee base from 165 to over 200 Loopers. If you’re interested in a position at Loopio, check out our careers page.

We’ll be hiring new employees not just around our headquarters in Toronto, but from regions across North America. We want to create a world-class, remote-first workplace where top performers from almost anywhere can learn, grow, and collaborate.

We’ll also invest more in our current employees by evolving our training programs, as well as perks and benefits. This way, Loopers can continue balancing their personal well-being with their professional aspirations. (You can learn more about how we take care of Loopers here.)

We’re extremely excited for the future of our company and the RFP response market. But I also want to acknowledge what won’t change: our commitment to serving our customers exceptionally well and creating one of the world’s best places to work.

We’ll continue on our journey to help sales and proposal teams streamline the RFP process. And we’ll do it how we’ve always done it—by focusing on helping both our customers and employees grow.

Here’s to a bright future, where we all grow together! 🚀