Glia (formerly SaleMove) Raises $20M in Series B Funding led by Insight Venture Partners to Transform How Companies Communicate with Customers

NEW YORK and TARTU, Estonia and TALLINN, Estonia, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Glia (formerly SaleMove), a leading digital customer service platform for financial services companies, today announced that it has raised $20 million in additional funding led by Insight Venture Partners, and joined by existing investors. This brings Glia's total fundraising to $29 million as Insight Venture Partners joins current investors Tola Capital, Wildcat Capital Management, and Grassy Creek, and Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator. As part of the investment, Lonne Jaffe, Managing Director at Insight Venture Partners, will join Glia's board of directors.

"We are proud to partner with Glia to transform how businesses connect with customers," said Lonne Jaffe, Managing Director at Insight Venture Partners. "Glia's innovative technology includes an elegant blend of CoBrowsing, video chat, voice communications, and a machine learning-powered chatbot chassis that works across Amazon Lex, Google Dialogflow, IBM Watson and more. Glia is one of the shining stars of the New York City technology ecosystem, and we're excited to get the chance to provide the fantastic team at Glia with the capital and scaling support needed to continue their rapid growth in 2019 and beyond."

Glia plans to expand its product development, sales, solutions, and marketing organizations, growing the employee headcount and infrastructure to further accelerate Glia's mission to transform how financial institutions connect with their customers using Messaging, Video, Voice, CoBrowsing, and Artificial Intelligence.

"Insight has a long history and excellent track record of working with best-in-class SaaS companies," said Dan Michaeli, Co-Founder and CEO at Glia. "By adding an investor as strong and experienced as Insight, we are poised to rapidly expand Glia's market reach. Almost every interaction between businesses and customers today involves a screen, yet the main method of getting in touch is still an old-school phone call. Over the next 3-5 years, the move from phone-first to digital-first communication will define the businesses that win customer experience in their category. Insight's successes in the enterprise technology space gives us great confidence in their deep understanding of these trends and we are energized to partner with them." 

This round of funding builds on a 2018 in which Glia had substantial success and growth across the entire enterprise as well as recognition by industry leaders.

•  >100% ARR growth year over year. For the third straight year, Glia saw a more than doubling in annual recurring revenue across its customer base. Supported by both additions of new logos in the Americas, EMEA, and APAC.
• Product. Glia launched many product features and enhancements to increase functionality and performance in 2018, with two major product additions:
  • Glia's Voice Platform embraces a future where customers will connect with businesses using digital voice rather than legacy phone numbers. The platform seamlessly integrates with Glia's Video, CoBrowsing, Messaging and AI solution to create a holistic System of Engagement.
  • With companies struggling to provide cohesion for the large number of chatbot deployments across multiple use cases, Glia created the first ever AI Management Platform that enables companies to integrate and manage chatbots from multiple partners (Amazon Lex, Google Dialogflow, IBM Watson, etc.). This management layer allows businesses to treat chatbots like human agents by easily evaluating performance with standard metrics/data and creating chatbot teams.
• Industry Recognition. Glia was highlighted by Forrester in Kate Leggett's recent report, How To Build A Modern Agent Desktop And Transform Customer Service Experiences.
• Hiring. Glia saw 50% employee growth globally across the United States and Estonia, and expanded the executive team with key hires including industry veteran John Fernandez who joins the company as Senior Vice President of Marketing.
• Awards. Glia continued its track record of winning key industry awards and recognition at events in the Americas and EMEA, including several best in show awards:
  • Best In Show, Orion Ascent/FUSE Conference (Miami Beach, September 2018)
  • Best in Show, Dig-In Insure Analytics and AI (New York, November 2018)
  • Best in Show, Finovate Europe (London, February 2019), marking the 5th time Glia has won Best in Show at a Finovate event
  • Best in Show, Credit Union National Association Governmental Affairs Conference (Washington D.C., March 2019)
• Re-Brand. Formerly known as SaleMove, the company re-branded as Glia in February. From the ancient Greek for "glue", Glia are the most numerous cells in the brain that provide physical and nutritional support for neurons. In short, your glia are the infrastructure which allows for all of the communication to take place in the nervous system. Just like the glia in the brain, Glia the company provides the infrastructure for companies to connect with their customers using Messaging, Video, CoBrowsing and AI.

Speaking about the re-brand, Glia Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Dan Michaeli stated "When we first started the company, we believed that we could build a platform in order to facilitate more sales, hence SaleMove. As we've built on this initial vision, our customers have found many ingenious uses for our functionality that we didn't imagine at the time. We realize now that the platform does so much more than move sales, so we've made the decision to build a brand which supports that wider vision of the value our customers are achieving."

About Glia
Glia creates digital-first moments that simplify and transform communications between financial institutions and their customers using Messaging, Video, Voice, CoBrowsing, and Artificial Intelligence. Fortune 500 companies that have high-consideration sales and support experiences need to deliver choice, continuity, and speed to their customers. Glia transcends the channel discussion to focus on what matters - customers. Glia is backed by leading venture capital investors including Insight Venture Partners, Tola Capital, Wildcat Capital Management, and Grassy Creek, and Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator. Glia is headquartered in New York City and has additional offices in Tartu and Tallinn, Estonia. For more information, visit www.glia.com.

About Insight Venture Partners
Insight Venture Partners is a leading global venture capital and private equity firm investing in high- growth technology and software companies that are driving transformative change in their industries. Founded in 1995, Insight currently has over $20 billion of assets under management and has cumulatively invested in more than 300 companies worldwide. Our mission is to find, fund, and work successfully with visionary executives, providing them with practical, hands-on growth expertise to foster long-term success. Across our people and our portfolio, we encourage a culture around a core belief: growth equals opportunity. For more information on Insight and all its investments, visit insightpartners.com or follow us on Twitter @insightpartners.