The customer experience platform Birdeye announced an important company milestone today, surpassing $100 million in annual recurring revenue.
Hitting $100 million in annual recurring revenue is an important and widely recognized milestone for SaaS companies. It’s commonly seen as a signal that a company has achieved sustainable revenue and scale.
Companies reach this milestone at different stages of their development. But regardless, it’s a significant marker. In Birdeye’s case, it took a decade. The company was founded in 2013 by Naveen Gupta and Neeraj Gupta.
Others have gotten to this revenue milestone faster. For example, last year the cloud security startup Wiz rather gleefully claimed the mantle of the world’s fastest-growing startup when it claimed to reach the $100 million annual recurring revenue milestone in just 18 months. The company went on to raise $300 million in February of this year. While 18 months is impressive, ‘slow and steady wins the race’ isn’t a bad ethos in the current, more sober post-easy-VC-money era.
That said, a decade really isn’t that long to scale. Birdeye helps both enterprises and SMBs drive customer engagement with tools like reviews management, surveys, and messaging applications. The company focuses on a handful of key verticals like health care and home services.
Birdeye has also been pretty aggressive recently in rolling out AI tools that make it easier for its customers to engage with their customers. For example by drafting responses to reviews, and more.
Rare Milestone
Whether it takes a decade or 18 months, hitting $100 million in ARR remains an exceedingly rare feat.
Here is how Birdeye CFO Yang Chao described the milestone in a company blog post today.
“Only 0.07% of companies ever reach the $100M ARR milestone,” Chao wrote. “Birdeye has been consistently rated as the #1 platform for reputation management and customer experience by G2 Crowd, Google, and Capterra.”
We also discussed the milestone during a recent conversation Localogy had with Birdeye President Dave Lehman.
“It’s a testament to our customers and the products we have built and to our people and partners and investors. So it’s a great milestone,” Lehman said.
Birdeye CEO Naveen Gupta also heralded the milestone in a Linkedin post.
“We help 100,000 local brands and businesses offer digital experiences to their 100 million customers,” Gupta wrote in announcing the milestone.
”However, there are 30 million businesses in the US alone…Our vision is to 10x our scale, i.e. 1 million businesses and their 1 billion customers. We’ll do that by doubling down on our investments in R&D and AI, and continuing to relentlessly focus on our core principles: product innovation, customer obsession, world-class execution, and family spirit.”
