Splashtop Inc., a provider of next-generation remote access and remote support, has closed a $50 million financing round that pushes its valuation beyond the $1 billion unicorn level. This financing round is led by Sapphire Ventures, alongside other long-time Splashtop investors include NEA, DFJ DragonFund, and Storm Ventures, a venture firm specialized in helping US & European startups accelerate their growth. Splashtop currently works with 85% of Fortune 500 companies, including Disney, FedEx, General Electric, Marriott and Toyota,
In 2020, Splashtop expanded its global reach by investments in Europe where the company opened its EMEA headquarters in Amsterdam. “Splashtop also launched a Germany-based cloud data centre, expanded its payments methods to support euro and GBP currencies, and also hired a local multilingual team to delight our customers even more” – said Alexander Draaijer, General Manager for Splashtop in EMEA. In Asia, the company opened an APAC channel headquarters in Singapore, supporting hundreds of revenue-generating channel partners and built enterprise channels in multiple countries, including Japan.
“Our sustained profitability and growth—which accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic—demonstrate that Splashtop’s modern approach to remote access is making a real difference in how, where and when people can use the digital resources they need to work, learn and be entertained, from anywhere,” said Mark Lee, co-founder, and CEO of Splashtop. “We’re fundraising now at unicorn valuation to amplify our brand and momentum so we can attract new talent, expand our enterprise presence, and accelerate our global expansion to delight customers everywhere.”
Splashtop’s growth trajectory has allowed the company to be profitable since 2015, with a current growth rate of 160% and profits of 60%.
Fueling Splashtop’s valuation is recognition of the company’s vision for disrupting the established remote access market and empowering leading businesses and institutions to thrive well beyond COVID. Analyst firm Gartner Inc identified “Anywhere Operations” as the number one business trend for 2021 in its report “Top Trends Impacting Infrastructure and Operations for 2021. The report also states that “48% of employees will work from home, even after the pandemic, compared with 30% pre-pandemic. This shift will force IT executives to develop flexible and resilient organisations that enable staff to work from anywhere, allow customers everywhere to access services, and manage the deployment of business services across distributed infrastructures”, putting Splashtop in the ideal position to help organisations update their infrastructure in a way that will help them succeed in the long term.
According to Ryan Floyd, a founding managing director of Storm Ventures, which has invested in Splashtop since its Series A funding, Splashtop is at the leading edge of the major IT trend highlighted by Gartner: “Splashtop replaces the clunky, complex, expensive legacy approaches to remote access—exemplified by virtual private networks (VPNs)—with a modern, cloud-native approach that provides secure, easy access to any digital assets, anywhere, at any time.”
Throughout Europe, and especially in the UK, France, and Germany, Splashtop experienced a rapid escalation of demand of its remote access solution for computer labs, primarily driven by word-of-mouth recommendations from one school to another.
“Since we started offering online courses thanks to Splashtop,” said Bechtle GMBH, a large European IT Provider for businesses and academic institutions, “We realised that our customers rated our courses higher and that we could expand our customer base now that we could offer courses throughout the whole country without the users having to travel in.”
