In less than 12 months after closing a $30M Series B round, Gtmhub, the Bulgarian OKRs management software, raises a record $120M Series C round. The news marks the first Series C round for a company founded in Bulgaria and a testimony of the developing local startup ecosystem. It is also the largest funding round in the OKR (objective and key results) software space.
The funding round is led Index Ventures, the international VC that has previously backed Deliveroo, Dropbox, and Slack, and is joined by the Berlin-based Visionaries Club and previous investors – the American VC for high-growth tech startup Insight Partners, the European VC Singular and CRV, a US venture capital firm for early-stage startups.
The OKR company enables organizations to align their employees with the organizational business goals. It does that by using an integrated button-up approach to identify the reasons leading to efficient performance. With the use of OKR software, businesses are able to increase transparency and productivity by showing how the actions of each employee bring about company objectives. With this most recent funding, Gtmhub will double down on platform innovation including prescriptive and predictive capabilities.
Right now, after six years of operations, Gtmhub has managed to grow a team of over 240 employees spread across their offices in Sofia, Berlin, London, and Denver, where the HQ is located. The company has over 500,000 users from more than 75 countries and works with clients such as Adobe, Red Hat, and Experian.
“Putting up the largest round in the industry so far is only validation that our model is working and proof that other players just can’t keep up. We are helping people and companies achieve their goals and get results while continuing to innovate and increase value for enterprise organizations and while our growth is rapid and our goals are ambitious, we have no plans to slow down,” Ivan Osmak, CEO of Gtmhub, comments.
The Bulgarian office of Gtmhub is located in Campus X and employs around 100 people, most of which are in IT roles. As the Bulgarian team takes care of R&D, it is key to Gtmhub’s success, and after the previous Series B round, the company more than tripled its Sofia-based team.
The significance of Gtmhub’s round in numbers
With a $161M total funding, Gtmhub has raised more than any other company in the OKR software industry.
- This is the third consecutive time that Gtmhub manages to raise a round quicker than the standard 18-month startup fundraising timeline.
- It also marks the biggest funding round for a Bulgarian startup and the first Series C round raised by a domestic company. **Considering that the US-Bulgarian growth companies Hyperscience and Leanplum have already raised Series C rounds. The difference comes from the fact that both Hyperscience and Leanplum were headquartered in the US since their launch, and that Gtmhub’s growth was empowered by Bulgarian VCs.**
- To put things into perspective, the last post-Series B round of the US OKR platform BetterWorks amounts to $61M, while the latest Series D round of Workboard is $75M.
What does it take to close a $120M round
Founded in 2015, the company started from a small garage in an industrial neighborhood in Sofia. Just as the Bulgarian fintech Payhawk which recently raised $112M Series B, Gtmhub is part of Telerik’s legacy – the biggest exit in the Bulgarian ecosystem. Three of the four co-founders – Radoslav Georgiev, Ivan Osmak, and Jordan Angelov, were part of Telerik before it got acquired by Progress.
In the first year and a half, they bootstrapped the startup’s development and invested all of their savings. However, with the growth and the increase in customer development expenses, the team attracted their first angel investors. Soon after that, in 2018, they secured their first institutional $1.2M seed round from LAUNCHub Ventures, Eleven Ventures, Tiny VC, Techstars, and the Bulgarian Angel investor Bogomil Balkansky, which allowed them to optimize their product-market fit.
This was followed by a Series A just one year later when the company raised $9M from the US fund CRV, Berkay Mollamustafaoglu, Head of OpsGenie at Atlassian, the serial entrepreneur and business angel Augusto Marietti, as well as previous investor LAUNCHub Ventures. Then, in January 2021 they closed a $30M Series B round from Insight Partners, LAUNCHub Ventures, CRV, and Singular VC.
Factors leading to the success of Gtmhub
Ever since the beginning, they built their product with the mindset that they would sell it to international clients as the local market was not mature enough and the awareness was not there. They targeted mainly the US and the EU markets which helped them attract institutional investors early on.
In a recent interview for The Recursive, Radoslav Georgiev shared that the most important lesson he has learned so far is that leaders should trust the people they work with and avoid micromanagement. “On a personal level, I have acknowledged the fact that a co-founder or a team leader does not have to necessarily know the optimal solution to a problem – one only needs to believe in the experts he/she works with and demonstrate trust and willingness to communicate,” he explains. In addition, Georgiev emphasizes the importance of having a strong company culture and recruiting for a good company fit.
Future growth plans
Last month Gtmhub acquired the Portland-based OKR and status-tracking software Koan to further solidify its position in the OKR landscape.
Now, the team of Gtmhub will use the raised capital to scale its operations, increase market penetration and expand the software’s product offerings by including predictive and prescriptive features. The company also plans to double the size of its current team and triple its revenue in the coming year.
