Kajabi Raises $550 Million and Garners Valuation Over $2 Billion with Growth Financing Led by Tiger Global

IRVINE, Calif., May 4, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Kajabi, an industry-leading e-commerce platform empowering entrepreneurs in the knowledge economy, today announced it has raised $550 million after completing a growth equity financing that values the company at over $2 billion. The new investment is led by Tiger Global Management and also includes TPG, Tidemark, Owl Rock Capital and Meritech Capital; they will join existing investor Spectrum Equity. The investment comes at a time where the knowledge commerce industry is exploding with increasingly more entrepreneurs building and scaling businesses online with digital products like online courses, membership communities, podcasts, newsletters, and others becoming increasingly popular.

As the Kajabi community has rapidly expanded, seasoned business owners and first-time knowledge entrepreneurs leveraging the platform are collectively generating more than $1.5 billion in GMV annually, growing more than 150% in the last year. With this round of funding, Kajabi, which remains a profitable business, intends to continue scaling its team and building best-in-class products, expand internationally, and explore strategic mergers and acquisitions that can further expand its product portfolio and geographic reach. As part of this new financing, Scott Wagner, former CEO of GoDaddy and Tidemark Advisor, will also be joining Kajabi's Board of Directors.

"The addition of our new investors validates Kajabi's mission of empowering knowledge entrepreneurs who are serious about achieving success online with their business," said Kajabi CEO and Co-founder Kenny Rueter. "The key to Kajabi's success in the knowledge economy is empowering our customers, knowledge entrepreneurs, with a one-stop-shop platform to create, build and grow their business and brand. Kajabi reduces the administrative burden of having to cobble together different software tools with an easy-to-use platform that saves our customers time and money, which they can reinvest into growing their businesses."

With the rapid expansion of the creator and passion economy – or as Kajabi describes it, the knowledge economy – many people have turned to the internet to meet both their professional and casual learning needs, creating immense opportunity for today's knowledge entrepreneurs. Kajabi offers these knowledge entrepreneurs a unique way to tap into the ever-growing knowledge economy by enabling them to monetize their expertise with all the necessary tools to create websites, online courses, coaching programs, membership sites and more to augment their offline business strategy. Unlike other online business offerings on the market, Kajabi is entirely customer-focused, giving them complete autonomy to drive their businesses forward and highlight their own brand, generate new revenue streams, build a unique brand in their category and achieve financial independence.

After spending its first 10 years as a bootstrapped, profitable business, Kajabi partnered with Spectrum Equity in 2019, who have been instrumental to the company's growth since. John Connolly, Managing Director of Spectrum Equity, said "We are incredibly fortunate to partner with the team at Kajabi and are proud of the company's extraordinary growth stemming from its entrepreneur/community-first approach to product innovation. We are excited for the new investors to join us in supporting the company's growth journey."

"Kajabi has pioneered the exploding knowledge economy and has built a fantastic product suite and all-up experience to power knowledge entrepreneurs across a host of industries including business and finance, marketing, personal development, and health and fitness, among many others. I'm excited to join Kajabi's board and to help build the platform for this global community," said Scott Wagner. "Kajabi has a deep customer-first ethos which is special and has been the heartbeat of the company since its founding."

Over the past two years, Kajabi has seen tremendous company growth, having quadrupled headcount since the beginning of 2019 and more than doubled in size again in 2020. Kajabi was also recognized as a Great Place to Work-Certified™ company in 2020, and through a validated employee survey conducted by Great Place to Work's rigorous, data-driven methodology, employee feedback confirmed Kajabi fosters a high-trust, high-performance culture from the ground up. One of the highlights uncovered by the employee feedback was that 99% of employees at Kajabi say it is a great place to work. As Kajabi customers continue to scale their own business, the company continues to grow right alongside them. The company is still in hyper-growth mode, with open positions across nearly the entire organization including product, engineering, user experience, marketing, customer experience, finance and people operations.

To learn more about Kajabi, please visit www.kajabi.com.

About Kajabi
Founded in Irvine, California, in 2010, Kajabi is a leading all-in-one platform for knowledge entrepreneurs to build, market, and sell educational content. With Kajabi's robust product features, users have a single ecosystem in which they can publish, market, and sell online courses, membership sites, communities, and other digital products. Tens of thousands of entrepreneurs rely on Kajabi to build and manage their online businesses, and the company has helped these entrepreneurs generate over $2 billion in sales from nearly 50 million customers to date. Learn more at www.kajabi.com and follow @Kajabi on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

About Spectrum Equity
Spectrum Equity is a leading growth equity firm providing capital and strategic support to innovative companies in the information economy. For over 25 years, the firm has partnered with exceptional entrepreneurs and management teams to build long-term value in market-leading Internet-enabled software and information services companies. Representative investments include Ancestry, Bats Global Markets, Definitive Healthcare, GoodRx, Grubhub, Lynda.com, Origami Risk, SurveyMonkey and Verafin. For more information, including a complete list of portfolio investments, visit www.spectrumequity.com.

About Tiger Global Management
Tiger Global Management, LLC is an investment firm that deploys capital globally. The firm's fundamentally oriented investments focus primarily on the global internet, software, financial technology, consumer and industrial sectors. The private equity strategy has a ten-year investment horizon and targets growth-oriented private companies. Such investments have included Spotify, Harry's, Warby Parker, Peloton, JD.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yandex, Mail.ru Group, Despegar, Ola and Flipkart. The public equity efforts emphasize deep due diligence on individual companies and long-term secular themes. Tiger Global was founded in 2001 and is based in New York with affiliate offices in Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangalore and Melbourne.

About TPG
TPG is a leading global alternative asset firm founded in 1992 with more than $91 billion of assets under management and offices in Beijing, Fort Worth, Hong Kong, London, Luxembourg, Melbourne, Mumbai, New York, San Francisco, Seoul, Singapore, and Washington, DC. TPG's investment platforms are across a wide range of asset classes, including private equity, growth equity, impact investing, real estate, secondaries, and public equity. TPG aims to build dynamic products and options for its investors while also instituting discipline and operational excellence across the investment strategy and performance of its portfolio. For more information, visit www.tpg.com and on Twitter @TPG.

About Tidemark
Tidemark is a venture capital firm and community built to serve category-leading technology companies as they scale. Tidemark gives back so that we all — entrepreneurs, investors and society — can move forward together. To learn more about Tidemark, visit www.tidemarkcap.com.

About Owl Rock
Owl Rock Capital Group, together with its subsidiaries, is a New York based alternative asset manager with approximately $27.1 billion of assets under management as of December 31, 2020. Owl Rock's platform consists of multiple investment funds and products including business development companies. Owl Rock is comprised of a team of seasoned investment professionals with significant and diverse experience from some of the world's leading investment firms and financial institutions. Owl Rock's relationship-oriented approach to investing seeks to provide companies with sizable commitments to facilitate transactions and support their growth needs with certainty, speed and transparency throughout the entire investment process. For more information, please visit us at www.owlrock.com.

About Meritech
Meritech Capital Partners is a leading provider of late-stage venture capital to category-defining private technology companies, and has been one of the top performing venture firms of the past two decades. The firm was founded in 1999 and has cumulatively managed almost $4 billion in total capital. Past and present investments include Alteryx, Anaplan, Braze, Coupa, Datadog, Facebook, Looker, MuleSoft, NetSuite, Outreach, Proofpoint, Roblox, Salesforce, Segment, Snowflake, Tableau and UiPath. The firm has offices in Palo Alto and San Francisco, CA and can be found at www.meritechcapital.com.

SOURCE Kajabi

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http://www.kajabi.com