Our Investment in BetterWorks

We are excited to announce Emergence Capital’s investment in BetterWorks – an innovative company that is bringing world-class productivity and performance to every enterprise.  CEO Kris Duggan and his all-star team are building a cloud-based “Business Operating System” that helps customers create, align and collaborate on corporate goals. In essence, BetterWorks is building the system of record for achieving business success. All of us at Emergence Capital were drawn to Kris’ vision to make employees more purposeful in their work, and we are thrilled to lead the Series B round for this fast-growing company.

Our BetterWorks investment is the result of several years of work around a thesis for the next generation of human capital management (“HCM”) applications. As an early investor at SuccessFactors, which went public and then got acquired for $3.4 billion by SAP, we participated in the first incarnation of HR applications in the cloud. Performance management, recruiting, and learning management were the three core pillars of the early cloud HR suite. While those products have had tremendous success, they were primarily cloud-based versions of classic, on-premise enterprise software solutions.  They were focused primarily on the needs of HR managers and the C-suite.

We believe that the next generation HCM leaders will deliver value to end users as much as to senior management. When we spoke with customers, we heard repeatedly that BetterWorks has inspired teams to be more engaged, focused and aligned than ever before. We discovered 90%+ companywide adoption rates and unprecedented end user engagement metrics. BetterWorks was built from the ground up with a relentless focus on end-user engagement combined with enterprise-grade capabilities and insights and this has been transformative for their customers.

Kris Duggan, Founder and CEO of BetterWorks, has attracted some of the world’s best SaaS leaders onto his team, many of whom we’ve had the pleasure of working with in the past. The more time we spent with Kris and his team, the more our excitement grew. The incredible talent, mutual respect, camaraderie and passion of this team is palpable and extends to the entire employee base. One of the core values of the BetterWorks team is “Sparkle,” and that Sparkle is evident in their culture and in their collective vision to help employees find purpose and meaning in their work.

At Emergence Capital, we partner with entrepreneurs who share our passion to transform the way business works, and BetterWorks is one of those truly exceptional opportunities. We are so proud to be partnering with Kris and his team to help BetterWorks achieve its potential, and we are also looking forward to working with co-investors John Doerr, Jason Lemkin and Joe Lonsdale.

We are thrilled to welcome Kris and his team to the Emergence family!