Highspot has reached an incredibly important and exciting milestone: the closing of its multi-billion-dollar merger with Seismic, which officially closed on Tuesday, August 18, after receiving regulatory approval the week before.
The Highspot journey, which began in 2012, is a testament to great founders. Robert Wahbe, Oliver Sharp, and David Wortendyke had all the tenacity and smarts it takes to build a successful company. And Highspot was that. It was a great success, and a pioneer in the field of sales enablement.
When Highspot started, they had an observation: search was just too hard inside the enterprise. You could find almost anything on Google, but you couldn’t find it on your own intranet. So they set out to build a platform to fix that, built on machine learning from the beginning. And early on, they found that one of the biggest use cases for organizing and searching internal content (and building workflows around it) was the sales and GTM organization. By building a sales content management system, they helped launch the field of sales enablement.
From that early observation and product, the platform grew to include a whole range of AI-assisted go-to-market functions: automated deal rooms, sales training, search, campaigns, and sales-efficiency analytics that tied the loop between CRM and everyday selling. They served over a million users, across a thousand customers, which included many of the largest enterprises in the world.
As machine learning evolved into AI, Highspot was always at the forefront. Just this past year the team shipped its Deal Agent, a multi-turn AI teammate that turns deal signals into next-best actions, which recommended content, drafting follow-ups, spinning up digital sales rooms, and generating role-plays grounded in a deal’s real stakeholders and objections. They also announced GTM Agent, extending that intelligence across marketing, enablement, and revenue operations, all powered by their unified AI and analytics engine. All of this functionality now sits side-by-side with Seismic’s incredibly full-featured product suite, truly creating a world-class, industry-defining platform.
This is a tribute to the incredible team that Robert, Oliver, and David built, stacked with amazing executives across every function.
Robert is a product visionary and a wizard at product marketing, messaging, and corporate strategy. Over the course of the company, he played every role: sales engineer, rep, marketer, spokesperson, engineer. Incredible IQ, grit, and empathy. The consummate founder.
Oliver Sharp gave me one of my favorite lines about startup founders: that they should wear rubber gloves, not white gloves. He lived it, moving from head of customer success and support to head of product to wherever the company’s biggest and most important problem needed solving, and coming through with incredible wisdom and calm, and a voracious drive for excellence. He’s the kind of person that when I talk with him (or when we did a podcast together) I feel like I should write down everything he says.
David Wortendyke, our CTO, quietly led by example, architecting all of the most challenging and cutting-edge parts of the platform, and personally writing more lines of code in the product than probably anyone else over the last dozen years, while leading an engineering team with some of the best people in the industry.
It extends well beyond the founders. We also were fortunate to hire Bhrighu Sareen, who led product and engineering over the last several years. His leadership, urgency, vision, and decision-making were instrumental in moving the company into true AI-native mode, helping build engineering teams in India and Canada, and setting the standard for customer-driven engineering excellence — working closely with AI leaders like Kurt Berglund, who has been key in building the AI brains of today’s platform. Engineering leader, Gurpreet Singh Pall, built the Indian development center in record time, creating a key engine for the company’s innovation. Tony Lew has led PM and design, ensuring customer-friendly UX for which they are known.
CFO Chris Larson, whose steady hand built the disciplined Finance function; General Counsel Matt Boisen and VP of Finance Hyo Hwang, who worked tirelessly on the transaction; Chief People Officer Amy Johnson, who sustained and nurtured the invaluable Highspot culture through ups and downs. An incredible GTM team including longtime sales leader Haley Katsman, who closed so many of our biggest deals and hired so many great people, global sales leader Stuart Gammon who helped spearhead international expansion, and dynamic marketing leaders Lucas Welch and Liz Tassey, and so many more indispensable leaders and team members. Highspot also never would have gotten to this milestone without the incredible leadership of former execs like longtime SVP of Sales Matt Weill and CMO Jon Perera — and many others who were here along the way and integral in building the company.
There were many ways Highspot innovated. One stands out to me that had nothing to do with product or technology: it was the first company I worked with where every board meeting started with people and culture. This was an organization that put people first, and it showed. That was a key enabler in building such a great team, and ultimately in showing so much customer love.
The management team worked very well together. They were always prepared, and every plan — whether external product plans or internal organization — was extremely well thought out and strategically bulletproof.
It wasn’t always easy. There were plenty of episodes of grit. Early on, we were fighting to win Amazon as our first major enterprise customer, and week after week, meeting after meeting, that purchase order sat in front of their senior leadership team and CEO, until it finally came through.
Like every startup success story, Highspot had its near-death experience. At one point, after we had burned through our Series A and a subsequent bridge loan from Madrona, Robert funded several payrolls out of his own checking account.
In those earliest days, “board meetings” consisted of Robert and me meeting for lattes every few weeks at Uptown Espresso in Belltown, talking through the challenges of building a category and building a company.
The company lived through many ups and downs: the nail-biting process of landing early major customers like Concur, COVID, the tech bubble that followed, and the slowdown after it. And while they anticipated and were leveraging the AI revolution we’re now in, no one could have predicted the sheer extent of its ramifications and disruption. Through all of it, they stayed focused on customers and innovating with AI.
Our original investment memo, back in 2014, cited Highspot’s “impressive product with engaging UX plus ML behind the scenes.” That (plus Customer Love) was the steel thread through the entire history of the company.
This steel thread is what we remain most excited about going forward. Combining with Seismic creates operational synergies that can be reinvested back into our combined industry-leading AI and the breadth and depth of the product. The combined company, operating as Seismic under CEO Rob Tarkoff, now serves 2,500 customers and 3.5 million users, and plans to invest more than $100 million a year in R&D across a global footprint — with Seattle very much a continuing R&D home. The product carries forward as “Highspot by Seismic.” All of it means doing an even better job for customers, with an incredible product experience that makes reps and sales teams at the world’s most demanding enterprises more efficient and more productive.
As much as this is a tremendous milestone for Highspot’s employees and shareholders, it is only a milestone. It’s the start of a new beginning. Robert Wahbe will join as a board member and I will serve as a board observer, both of us working closely with the Seismic board and the combined company. We have been highly impressed with CEO Rob Tarkoff and with majority shareholder Permira’s leadership, and their entire excellent team. We can’t wait to begin the hard work of this next phase — continuing to use AI to change how work gets done across sales, marketing, enablement, revenue operations, and customer-facing teams — and to build this into a truly iconic AI software company, through a potential IPO and beyond.
Madrona feels honored to have been part of this journey from the earliest days. This has truly been a Day One for the Long Run investment and relationship. We led the $6M Series A in July 2014 with a $4.5M investment on a $13M pre-money valuation. I was so fortunate to work with this team for more than 12 years. And I want to thank the board itself, which was always productive, collaborative, and cohesive. Particular thanks go to Doug Pepper and Tracey Newell, from whom I learned an immense amount and who are the consummate board members.
The best part of venture capital (by far) is the opportunity to work with brilliant, committed, passionate people and to help them delight customers, build important businesses, and positively impact the world. Highspot has been that in every way. It will always be a defining investment for Madrona and a defining personal experience of my career. Special thanks to the many Madrona team members, past and present, who have helped Highspot in ways big and small over the years.
Congratulations and a heartfelt thank you to Robert, Oliver, David, and the entire Highspot team on an extraordinary journey. The hard work of the combined company has already begun in the quest to take the next vista. Onward and upward, together!
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