Kandji, the startup building an Apple device management business, has been doing pretty well for itself with rapdily growing revenue, a fat valuation and lots of investment capital rolling in. Today, the company announced a $100 million Series C on an $800 million valuation, up 10x in the last year when the company did its $21 million Series A. It quickly followed with a $60 million Series C last April.
Tiger Global led today’s investment with participation from Definition, Frontline Ventures and existing investors First Round Capital, Greycroft, Felicis Ventures, The Spruce House Partnership, B Capital Group, SVB Capital and Okta Ventures. Kandji has raised over $188 million, according to the company, with $181 million coming since last October.
The company offers medium-to-large businesses a way to manage their Apple devices and he says that the pandemic and working from home really drove inbound customer interest. In fact, revenue has grown over 700 percent in the last year, according to founder and CEO Adam Pettit.
Part of that is the result of growth in Europe, which has led to the startup opening a London office and that part of their market contributing substantially to the revenue mix. “We just launched operations in Europe. We [opened an office in] London, and we’re going to be rapidly hiring there,” he said. “And the catalyst for that was really interesting. We do very little to no marketing internationally, but we’ve seen that over the last year, roughly 25% of our top line revenues comes internationally.”
He is also seeing bigger customers more generally, who are becoming more comfortable that Kandji is in it for the long haul with this level of investment. “We’ve been adding larger and larger customers as we’ve been around longer, and our customers are getting comfortable that we’re here to stay,” he said. “In order to manage those [larger] customers pre- and post- sales, you need more sophisticated teams. We’ve been building that out over the last six months.”
Pettit says that they have over 1000 companies using the platform, and grew from 40 employees at the start of the year to over 250 today, and he hopes to get to 400 by next year. Last year when I spoke to him around the Series C, Pettit talked about how important it was to build a diverse and inclusive culture, and that it started with recruiting. He says that commitment has not wavered.
“We actually do a number of different things to expand the reach of our pipeline, making sure we’re moving outside of our normal networks to grab candidates that would not otherwise be available to us. The other thing that’s been great for [building diversity] for us, and I’d imagine for a lot of other companies, is being able to hire remotely means that we’re not targeting one specific market. And so that [really helps] for increasing the diversity of our hiring pipelines,” he said.
While the company has offices in San Diego and London, Pettit says his is a remote first company and he intends to keep it that way moving forward.
