Kajabi Raises $550 Million and Garners Valuation Over $2 Billion with Growth Financing Led by Tiger Global
Investment comes as the all-in-one e-commerce platform is now powering more than $1.5 billion in annual customer GMV and experiencing explosive growth, solidifying Kajabi as the market leader in the knowledge economy
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.
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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.
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“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.
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After spending its first 10 years as a bootstrapped, profitable business, Kajabi partnered with Spectrum Equity in 2019, which has 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.
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