Business software marketplace G2 raises $157M

Business software intelligence marketplace G2 (formerly known as G2 Crowd) has raised $157 million in a series D round of funding.

Founded out of Chicago in 2012, G2 is probably better known as a “Yelp for business software,” a public-facing portal to garner insights, feedback, and reviews spanning thousands of popular applications. This includes the ability to compare and contrast similar software before reaching a buying decision.

G2 cofounder and CEO Godard Abel said a recent survey the company carried out revealed that 94% of enterprise software buyers “don’t trust vendor sales and marketing people,” a statistic that could probably apply to just about any software vertical across the business and consumer spheres.

“G2 brings trust and transparency to the enterprise software buying process,” Abel told VentureBeat. “Software buyers now rely on trusted peer reviews for everything they shop for as consumers — this is increasingly true for B2B software purchases.”

Today, G2 claims more than 1.3 million reviews and ratings, with 60 million enterprise software buyers visiting its platform each year.

Show me the data

On the other side, G2 enables paying companies such as Adobe, Autodesk, HubSpot, Salesforce, and Zoom to manage their online product profile and glean insights, such as buyer intent, which helps them identify potential customers and target them with tailored campaigns at the right time. This is enabled by integrations with the likes of LinkedIn, Salesforce, HubSpot, Terminus, Salesloft, and Outreach.

Internally, companies can also use G2 Track — a result of the company’s 2018 Siftery acquisition — to monitor and manage their SaaS spend, with granular analytics detailing how employees and departments use each piece of software, enabling businesses to cut their spend on underused products.

It also allows them to track all their vendor contracts in a centralized hub, which may help identify duplicate SaaS subscriptions taken out by different teams.

G2 had previously raised around $100 million, and its latest cash injection was led by Permira’s growth fund, with participation from HubSpot Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Accel, Emergence, and IVP. The company also confirmed it is now valued at more than $1 billion.

Self-analysis

While online reviews have existed since the advent of the web, large businesses looking for software insights and recommendations to power their buying decisions have not always been served in the same way as consumers researching the best restaurants or hotels have been.

Traditionally, businesses have often had to pay to access third-party research and reports (e.g. from Gartner), something that G2 helps circumvent with real-time reviews that can be filtered and segmented by company size. This means a potential enterprise buyer can choose to view ratings purely from other enterprise buyers — this is important because companies can have entirely different experiences based on their needs and use cases.

“Unlike analyst models, G2’s platform provides real-time data sourced from actual, verified software users,” Abel said. “There is no need to purchase subscriptions for tens of thousands of dollars to access research or to pay thousands of dollars for access to analysts.”