SAN FRANCISCO — August 9, 2022 — Front, a communication hub for building strong customer relationships, today announced it has been named to the Forbes 2022 Cloud 100, the definitive ranking of the top 100 private cloud companies in the world, published by Forbes in partnership with Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures. Front was recognized as #100 on the list for its strong business growth, technological innovation and workplace culture.
Front is on a mission to enable better relationships at scale and is disrupting customer support software and email — two of the largest and most deeply entrenched markets in SaaS. Built specifically for businesses that want to differentiate on great customer relationships, Front’s software keeps a team’s focus on the relationship by wrapping collaboration and customer data around the customer conversation. This approach ensures businesses don’t have to choose between being efficient or being human. With Front, teams can deliver fast, accurate and personalized responses — and customers never feel like tickets or numbers.
“More than ever, companies need to make sure customers have an excellent experience and feel well-served with interactions tailored to their needs. Front builds technology that makes a business far more efficient when it comes to maintaining strong customer relationships — as opposed to automating, deflecting, or making interactions feel impersonal. The results for our customers are not only deepened relationships with users, but greater productivity and efficiency savings as teams handle higher volumes of communication at higher levels of service,” said Mathilde Collin, co-founder and CEO of Front. “This recognition from Forbes, Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures is a gratifying endorsement of the value we deliver to our customers. Front has the potential to truly drive meaningful relationships across every business and industry, and we’re just scratching the surface of what’s possible.”
Front has experienced tremendous growth over the past year, and the Forbes 2022 Cloud 100 recognition comes fresh off the heels of Front’s $65 million Series D financing in June, which was led by Salesforce Ventures and Battery Ventures, with participation from PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada and other existing investors. Now valued at $1.7 billion with over $200 million in funding, Front serves more than 8,000 customers in over 100 countries, including Shopify, Airbnb, Hulu, Lyft, Mailchimp, Flexport, MongoDB, and five of the Fortune 25.
For the seventh straight year, the Cloud 100 reviews submissions from hundreds of cloud startups and private companies each year. The Cloud 100 evaluation process involved ranking companies across four factors: market leadership (35%), estimated valuation (30%), operating metrics (20%), and people & culture (15%). For market leadership, the Cloud 100 enlists the help of a judging panel of public cloud company CEOs who assist in evaluating and ranking their private company peers.
“The companies of the Cloud 100 list represent the best and brightest private companies in this fast-growing sector,” said Alex Konrad, senior editor at Forbes. “Every year, it gets more difficult to make this list — meaning even more elite company for those who do. Congratulations to each of the 2022 Cloud 100 honorees.”
“The public markets may be in turmoil, but the private valuations of the Cloud 100 continue to rise. All of the 2022 Cloud 100 honorees, again, have reached the $1 billion valuation milestone, and the average Cloud 100 valuation has skyrocketed to $7.4 billion,” said Mary D’Onofrio, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. “Despite the market correction in 2022, our confidence in the cloud economy continues to grow—today over 70% of the 2022 Cloud 100 Honorees have reached or exceeded $100 million in annual recurring revenue making them cloud Centaurs. An additional 10% of the list is expected to hit this milestone by the end of the year, furthering our conviction that this years’ honorees truly represent the best cloud companies globally.”
“Great companies are born out of all environments, and it’s exciting to see the continued momentum in the cloud sector,” said Alex Kayyal, Managing Partner, Salesforce Ventures. ”The companies on this list have gone through a rigorous selection process, and join an esteemed alumni list of Cloud 100 companies. As the need for digital transformation continues to drive innovation and efficiencies across industries, we can look to these companies as the absolute best in cloud computing.“
The Forbes 2022 Cloud 100 and 20 Rising Stars lists are published online at www.forbes.com/cloud100. Highlights of the list appear in the August/September 2022 issue of Forbes magazine.
This year, the CEOs of The Cloud 100 and the 20 Rising Stars companies will be honored with a digital content launch, as well as at the exclusive Cloud 100 Celebration hosted by Bessemer Venture Partners, Salesforce Ventures, and Forbes. A special thank you to our event sponsors Amazon Web Services (AWS), Bank of America, Cooley, Fuel a McKinsey Company, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Nasdaq, and Silicon Valley Bank.
About Front
Front is a communication hub for building strong customer relationships on digital channels. For many businesses, almost every customer conversation can make or break the relationship -- the stakes are that high. Front puts these conversations at the center of a team’s attention and surrounds them with collaboration capabilities and contextual data from multiple systems. This lets teams stay focused on delivering timely, accurate and deeply personalized communications. Nearly 8,000 businesses, including Shopify, Airbnb, Hulu, Lyft, and Mailchimp, use Front to build better customer relationships, one conversation at a time. To learn more, visit front.com.
Bessemer Venture Partners
Bessemer Venture Partners helps entrepreneurs lay strong foundations to build and forge long-standing companies. With more than 135 IPOs and 200 portfolio companies in the enterprise, consumer and healthcare spaces, Bessemer supports founders and CEOs from their early days through every stage of growth. Bessemer’s global portfolio includes Pinterest, Shopify, Twilio, Yelp, LinkedIn, PagerDuty, DocuSign, Wix, Fiverr and Toast and has $19 billion of regulatory assets under management. Bessemer has teams of investors and partners located in Tel Aviv, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, New York, London, Boston, Beijing and Bangalore. Born from innovations in steel more than a century ago, Bessemer’s storied history has afforded its partners the opportunity to celebrate and scrutinize its best investment decisions (see Memos) and also learn from its mistakes (see Anti-Portfolio).
About Forbes
Forbes champions success by celebrating those who have made it, and those who aspire to make it. Forbes convenes and curates the most influential leaders and entrepreneurs who are driving change, transforming business and making a significant impact on the world. The Forbes brand today reaches more than 150 million people worldwide through its trusted journalism, signature LIVE and Forbes Virtual events, custom marketing programs and 47 licensed local editions in 80 countries. Forbes Media’s brand extensions include real estate, education and financial services license agreements.
Salesforce Ventures
Salesforce Ventures helps enterprising founders build companies that reinvent the way the world works. Since 2009, we’ve invested in and partnered with more than 400 of the world’s most tenacious enterprise software companies from seed to IPO, including Airtable, Databricks, DocuSign, Guild Education, Hopin, monday.com, nCino, Snowflake, Snyk, Stripe, Tanium, and Zoom. Salesforce Ventures leverages our decades of expertise in the cloud and our long-term relationships with key decision-makers at thousands of businesses around the world to give our portfolio companies an unfair advantage, help them build credibility, and accelerate growth. Salesforce Ventures has invested in more than 25 countries with offices all over the world including in San Francisco, Irvine, New York, London, Tokyo, and Sydney. Follow @SalesforceVC and learn more at http://www.salesforceventures.com.
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Caty Dickensheets
Written by Front Team
Originally Published: 9 August 2022