Smartsheet is not about one big moment or one big idea – we’re the product of thousands of moments made possible by our team, our partners, and our customers. Today, we announce another milestone on our journey to empower anyone to drive meaningful change. We are the first in the Enterprise Work Management category to surpass $1 billion in annualized recurring revenue (ARR).
Similar to our IPO in 2018, we are emboldened by this moment. This milestone is anything but a destination. With scale comes responsibility – and the ability to serve even more people, more effectively.
Early on, we knew teams and organizations needed a way to operate more effectively and in a more connected way. We knew that workers – across industries and around the world – could massively benefit from a productivity platform that unified critical work functions, was easily configurable, and could be understood and embraced by anyone, regardless of their technical fluency.
Every person responsible for executing work can benefit from doing so in a planful, organized, consistent way. It’s not just people in finance or manufacturing, it's not just tech, education, or local government. It's everywhere and it’s everybody.
In our first year, we were a Pacific Northwest startup with a handful of customers, had a young but mighty product, and a vision to empower millions to work better. That’s how we started. We didn’t have dashboards, or automation, or integrations, or many of the other capabilities we have today. Most teams and organizations were aware of the cloud but weren’t capitalizing on it at all. Nearly two decades later, we are a global company with a vision to enable all organizations, especially large enterprises, to operate at their peak. And we are on the mission to reach and serve those who expect excellence of themselves.
Being the first in our category to cross the billion dollar ARR threshold is meaningful, and I’m proud and grateful for the people who helped make it happen. We are taking a moment to note this – and then getting right back to work. There is much to do, millions more to serve, and many innovations to deliver on.
Today, we are trusted by more than 85 percent of the 2023 Fortune 500, yet only an estimated 10 percent of the world’s organizations run a work management platform to manage projects, automate processes, and scale their programs. To stay competitive and to serve the needs of their AI-supported workforce, most organizations will choose a work management platform. We want to be their choice, and we’re moving faster and more intentionally than ever.
It took Smartsheet about 16 years to reach $500 million in ARR, and just an additional 2 ½ years to hit $1 billion. Our next goal is both about getting to the next financial milestone AND enabling an increasingly large and diverse customer base to realize maximum value by executing better, faster, and more effectively.
When your mission is to enable anyone to drive meaningful change, you’re not satisfied only by serving those who contribute directly to a financial milestone. That’s why we launched our free plan globally in 2023 – because we wanted anyone to be able to get started, get educated, and have impact. And as we become a bigger business, we have more diversity in our product, greater reach, and are delivering even more value.
I visit with many customers and hear countless stories about how they are changing lives and solving problems. For me, one of the most memorable stories in recent years is Syngenta. This is an agtech company in more than 90 countries that’s helping farmers adapt to climate change and produce more food sustainably as the world’s population grows by 200,000 people a day. You can see their story here, and it is amazing to be part of it. Smartsheet helps them make faster, real-time decisions about the crops they produce and the way they work because their data is centralized and discoverable. They’re able to use this data to inform their business decisions as they work to feed the world and take care of the planet.
And I always enjoy talking to the people at Populous, a longtime customer, who uses Smartsheet to produce events like the Olympic Games and NCAA Final Four. You can only imagine the kind of planning that goes into every detail for events like the Big Game, from lighting to construction to timing for halftime concerts – and they use Smartsheet to manage their countless tasks and deadlines for events seen by millions of people.
There are nearly 13 ½ million Smartsheet users, and each has a story. And I am especially proud of our collaboration with Roche Diagnostics during the worldwide pandemic. Together, in the early days of the pandemic, we created a solution that met the escalating demand for COVID-19 tests in the U.S., making sure that tests were delivered where they were most needed – while rapidly reporting pandemic data to the federal government.
We continue to transform the way people work, and the potential keeps climbing as we empower changemakers with applied generative AI in a single platform to manage all aspects of the work that spans their organizations. This is a journey, one that is inspiring and rewarding, and never ending. Our step across the $1 billion threshold is significant – but it is just one milestone. The truly exhilarating moments are when people unlock and achieve their potential – and that will happen today, tomorrow, and for years to come.
The journey continues. Onward!
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