Pendo crosses the pond ahead of Brexit, selecting London base for expansion in Europe

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Mar 05, 2019, 09:00 ET

LONDON, March 5, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- U.S. technology company Pendo will open a UK office in London on 5 March 2019, its first European office. In spite of the uncertainty surrounding Brexit, and having explored other European options, the company has settled on London with its rich pool of technology talent and cultural diversity, and proximity to a growing customer base in Europe.

Founded in 2013 in Raleigh N.C. and backed by Battery Ventures, Spark Capital, Meritech Capital and Sapphire Ventures, Pendo has raised $106 million. Pendo offers a product experience platform—also known as a product cloud—that provides user insight, guidance and communication to digital product teams. The company has 850 customers globally—over 40 in EMEA—including Marketo, OpenTable, Zendesk, Salesforce, Coupa, BMC, and Sage. In 2018, it was named to the Forbes Cloud 100 and Next Billion-Dollar Startups lists.

The company also announced today highlights of its fiscal year, which ended 31 January 2019. Revenue grew 130 percent during the year, as the company headcount reached 300 people in offices in Raleigh, San Francisco, New York and Herzliya, Israel.

With the Pendo product cloud, product, customer success and growth marketing teams can understand product usage, collect feedback, measure NPS, onboard users, and announce new features in app—all without requiring engineering resources. Customers simply install a line of code in a web or mobile application and begin understanding user actions in their software. By pairing insights from user behavior with in-app guidance and communication, software organizations can increase user engagement, improve onboarding and retention, and ultimately make better products.

Pendo has ambitious plans for growth in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa with goals to triple the customer base this year and count 400 customers in the region within three years. It has hired software industry veteran Perry Gale as its EMEA managing director, and relocated a small team of U.S. sales and customer success team members to establish the office in Shoreditch. The company plans to end the year with a team of a dozen in London.

"As a global center of business, and a hub for B2B software companies, London boasts the largest and most diverse talent pool in Europe. The people who live and work here hail from around the world. They speak multiple languages and have connections across Europe and the Middle East," said Todd Olson, Pendo CEO and co-founder. "We believe London is the best place for Pendo to launch its EMEA operations and to continue our quest to help companies around the globe build amazing software products."

Olson also cited the city's easy access to Pendo's four office locations—especially a daily direct flight between London and Raleigh.

Commenting on Brexit, Olson added, "I know we are bucking the trend. Most businesses are watching and waiting until after Brexit; others have contingency planned by establishing offices in other European cities, and here we are coming to London as our gateway to Europe. We've always done things a little differently at Pendo—we chose Raleigh instead of Silicon Valley, and we focus on what our customers need rather than what our competitors are doing. So far it's paid off."

SOURCE Pendo