Coveo Raises $227 Million Investment Round Led by OMERS

Coveo, a recognized industry leader in AI SaaS enterprise solutions, has secured a further $227 million in funding. The investment was led by OMERS Growth Equity based in Toronto, New York, and London, with participation from existing investors and other financial institutions including Evergreen Coast Capital, Elliott Management’s Menlo Park, California-based private equity affiliate, FSTQ, and IQ.

“Companies from Formica to Tableau see us as a key platform to meet the challenges of doing business in today’s data-driven AI-takes-all economy,” said Louis Tetu, CEO and Chairman of Coveo. “We believe that to serve a million people you need to deliver a million unique experiences. We help businesses globally become digital experience leaders and compete against digital giants, using data and AI to deliver the personalized, predictive and profitable experiences expected in today’s market.”

Coveo enables more than 500 of the world’s most admired companies to deliver effortless experiences that deliver real business value: from improving a top 10 retailer’s revenue per visit by 8 percent; to saving Tableau over $18M a year through enabling client self-service; to improving customer service agent efficiency at Medallia by 34 percent. Coveo offers AI solutions to dynamically serve relevance and recommendations at scale across every digital journey, and is uniquely positioned to enable companies to be relevant, coherent, and optimize profitability at every interaction. This is highly valuable for web, commerce, service, and workplace applications across the enterprise, equipping enterprises to thrive in today’s competitive landscape.

“We believe that Coveo is the market leader in leveraging data and AI to personalize at scale,” said Mark Shulgan, Managing Director and Head of Growth Equity at OMERS. “Coveo fits our investment thesis precisely: an A-plus leadership team with deep expertise in enterprise SaaS, a Fortune 1000 customer base who deeply love the product, and a track record of high growth in a market worth over $100 billion. This makes Coveo a highly-coveted asset. We are glad to be partnering to scale this business.”

The funding round caps another impressive year of growth for Coveo, with SaaS subscription revenues growing more than 55 percent year-over-year, and a continual stream of product innovation releases – including a recent commerce AI acquisition – across its cloud-based AI personalization, recommendations and search platform. Coveo is now 500 employees strong and continues to recruit the best talent in data science to grow its teams located in offices based in Quebec City, San Francisco and London, and its iconic new office in downtown Montreal’s Windsor Station. Coveo’s market presence has also been recognized by two major independent research firms: Coveo was named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines 2019; and a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Cognitive Search, Q2, 2019.

According to Tableau Senior Program Manager, User Experience, Dave Jobling, “Coveo has been a strategic partner. They helped us save $18M a year in support overhead as part of our digital transformation initiatives.”

“Coveo gives companies like ours a competitive edge by enabling us to anticipate and meet our customer needs,” said Amy Gath, Vice President of Marketing at Formica. “With rich content navigation and powerful personalization, formica.com has seen a double-digit increase in visitors and conversions up triple digits.”

“Companies need to look at harvesting data and using AI as a way to scale their businesses – especially their customer service and support organizations. According to our State of Support Services 2019 Report, the need for AI technology in customer service and support is very high,” said John Ragsdale, Distinguished Vice President Technology Research at the Technology Services Industry Association. “AI personalization through intelligent recommendations and search platforms, such as Coveo, are my top recommended investment. Indexing all content and data in the customer journey – from initial outreach to support – and then applying AI to automatically recommend the most relevant next step for the customer or employee, puts Coveo in an excellent position for future growth,” he continued.

Full terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The equity investment by OMERS and existing shareholders represents a 15.5% stake in the company. Following the close of the transaction, Mark Shulgan will join the Coveo Board of Directors.

RBC Capital Markets and BofA Securities acted as financial advisors to the company for this financing.