Whatfix secures $90M to power contextual guidance in enterprise apps

Whatfix, a “digital adoption” platform that enterprises use to bake user support tools into their software, has raised $90 million in a series D round of funding.

With every company now a software company, this has created demand for tools to help build and test software. But once that software is out there in the wild, there also need to be ways to encourage people to use the software to its fullest potential, and that essentially is where Whatfix comes into play, by allowing companies to create their own guides and walkthroughs to help remove any friction.

Smart tips

Over its seven-year history, the San Jose-based startup has amassed a roster of high-profile customers such as Cisco, Wipro, and Experian, who leverage Whatfix to inject features such as tip-balloons to showcase new features, “smart tips” that give contextual information when the user hovers over an element with their mouse, and other overlays that guide users iteratively through key steps to complete a specific goal or task. This could be how to enter a new sales lead into Salesforce, for example.

Above: Whatfix walkthrough in Salesforce

The Whatfix platform can also tailor its guidance based on context, recognizing a user’s location in an app and analyzing their usage to decide what tips it needs to surface next.

“We help enterprises maximize the return on their technology investment through increasing user adoption and productivity and reducing training costs and time,” Whatfix cofounder and chief product and technology officer Vara Kumar told VentureBeat. “A typical enterprise has more than 900 apps, and a typical enterprise employee is exposed to more than 15 apps. Whatfix provides the personalized experiences and contextual guidance that enterprises need to effectively use all of their software.”

Whatfix integrates with myriad enterprise tools such as Salesforce, SAP, Power BI, Slack, and Workday, while it offers a suite of analytics including engagement metrics that show which guides are proving the most popular in terms of usage.

Above: Whatfix analytics

Adopting digital adoption

Prior to now, Whatfix had raised around $50 million, including its $32 million series C round from last year. The company’s latest funding tranche was spearheaded by SoftBank’s Visions Fund 2, with participation from Cisco Investments, Sequoia Capital India, Eight Roads Ventures, F-Prime Capital, and Dragoneer Investment Group.

Kumar said that its funding will be put toward product development, including new “out-of-box” enterprise solutions for specific industry use-cases. Moreover, it will also invest in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning for behavioral analytics, including analyzing user interactions within the application and reducing friction. “Whatfix uses its own user-similarity score, which recognizes users with similar technical abilities,” Kumar explained. “By looking at the pattern of application usage and support requirements, Whatfix will proactively recommend the next steps.”

Other notable players in the space include the likes of WalkMe and Pendo, both of which have also raised hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital over the past decade. And according to Kumar, the global pandemic has served as an “additional catalyst” to accelerate the pace of digital adoption software in the enterprise.

“Many found that they need more digital tools to support a remote workforce, but realized that without personalized experiences and contextual guidance provided by solutions like Whatfix, just adding more applications doesn’t necessarily mean better business outcomes,” Kumar said. “I believe that as hybrid-working starts becoming popular and mainstream, the need for digital adoption solutions will only increase further.”

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