Clari acquires Groove to build a comprehensive revenue platform with AI

Clari, a leading revenue operations platform, announced today that it has acquired Groove, a leading sales engagement platform, for an undisclosed amount. The deal will enable Clari to offer the first end-to-end revenue platform that executes all internal and external revenue workflows, from prospecting to closing to renewing.

“This is the most transformative day of our history,” Andy Byrne, CEO of Clari, told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview. “It’s a big acquisition for us.”

“When we started this company, our thesis was grounded in the belief that AI would revolutionize how businesses manage revenue. More specifically, our vision was to assist CEOs in answering the critical question of whether they would meet or miss revenue targets,” he explained. “We aimed to offer a predictive solution to address the common issue of revenue leaks that many companies face. Our goal was to help them achieve what we call revenue precision.”

Optimizing sales and revenue operations

The acquisition comes at a time when businesses are increasingly looking for ways to optimize their sales and revenue operations. According to Seth Marrs, principal analyst at Forrester, “This acquisition will create a sense of urgency in the market that leads all key players to step up their focus to create their own version of a revenue orchestration platform. It’s a significant win for all companies looking to improve sales performance.”

The timing of the acquisition coincides with shifting market conditions and buyer demands, explained Dan Gottlieb, senior director analyst at Gartner. As growth models become challenging, revenue teams want to simplify tech stacks while still leveraging AI.

“B2B sales tech buyers want to take advantage of AI for sales and simultaneously reduce complexity in their tech stack,” Gottlieb said. “Clari with Groove now has the pieces to deliver a complete revenue hub with interconnected workflows and deep data integrations.”

The move also responds to a significant shift in the industry, wherein growth-focused companies are struggling to secure funding to transition to profit-focused models. Marrs added, “Consolidating to create a more comprehensive platform is the best option in this environment. Those that don’t, face the less appealing prospect of a down round or going out of business.”

Rapid shift in market conditions

With the acquisition of Groove, Clari will gain an advantage over its rivals in the sales technology market, such as Gong, SalesLoft, Outreach and ZoomInfo. Clari will be able to provide a broader set of capabilities across various sales technology categories, such as revenue intelligence, conversation intelligence, sales engagement and data workflow.

Clari will also stand out with its generative AI technology. Clari uses generative AI to correlate and attribute different signals from external and internal workflows, and to help revenue teams reduce their time to revenue.

Founded in 2012, Clari is one of the fastest-growing companies in the sales tech market, with a valuation of more than $2.6 billion and a total funding of $375 million in the last 12 months. The company has powered many successful IPOs in recent years, such as Confluent, UiPath, Procore and Hashicorp. Clari’s revenue operations platform is used by more than 450 companies across different industries, such as Adobe, Dell Technologies, Dropbox, Qualtrics, Splunk, Twilio, Workday and Zoom.

Clari plans to integrate Groove’s data and capabilities into its platform in six to nine months. Clari will be able to use Groove’s sales engagement features to execute personalized and scalable outreach campaigns, while Groove will be able to benefit from Clari’s revenue intelligence features to forecast more accurately, identify risks and opportunities, and optimize sales performance. This will create a powerful and efficient solution for revenue teams to run their entire revenue process in one unified system.