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Gtmhub, a Denver, Colorado-based startup developing an objectives and key results (OKR) tracking platform, today announced that it raised $120 million in series C funding led by Index Ventures with participation from Visionaries Club, Insights Partners, Singular, and CRV. The proceeds bring the company’s total raised to over $161 million, which CEO Ivan Osmak says will be put toward hiring and product expansion.
Gtmhub was founded in 2015 by Osmak, Jordan Angelov, Radoslav Georgiev, and Bo Pedersen. Delivered as a service, the company’s software provides guides to help managers craft OKRs while aligning teams, updating stakeholders as milestone makers are reached.
“Gtmhub was originally founded as a data company that formed into an OKR company. Data informs strategy and strategy affects data. With Gtmhub organizations can meet the need to work faster, be agile, and change course more rapidly,” Osmak told VentureBeat via email. “The round will be used for scaling, increasing market penetration and expanding product offerings, including predictive and prescriptive capabilities.”
Tracking OKRs
The development of OKRs is generally attributed to Andrew Grove, who implemented the approach at Intel during his tenure there. Intel salesperson John Doerr introduced OKRs to Google, where they took hold. Today, OKRs are used by companies like Amazon and Spotify to define goals or objectives and then track the outcome.
OKRs continue to serve companies well in this digital era, with McKinsey asserting that practices such as objectives and key results have “speeded up their work.” But as workforces become even more distributed than at the start of the pandemic, some enterprises are struggling to track progress toward goals across their employees, divisions, and organizations.
Above: Gtmhub’s objective-tracking cloud dashboard.
According to statistics compiled by Kaplan and Norton, about 90% of companies fail to develop a comprehensive goal-setting strategy. Moreover, only 25% of managers link work tasks to achieving company goals, while 85% of executive teams spend just one hour each month discussing OKR strategy.
Gtmhub can ostensibly help these enterprises monitor performance from multiple sources in one dashboard, where goals can be shared, annotated, reviewed, or broken down into subgoals. The software provides a notebook-like collaborative environment where leaders can brainstorm OKRs before publishing them, as well as tools and custom fields that let users create links between tasks and objectives or key results.
One of Gtmhub’s more unique features is its use of robotic process automation (RPA), which lets its customers deploy and manage OKRs “at scale,” in Gtmhub’s words. RPA can be deployed within the software to compare OKR progress to previous values, or to automatically alert managers if someone has aligned to an OKR and if there are any drastic changes to the OKR progress.
Gtmhub integrates with a number of existing HR platforms via an API and common file storage formats. And for extensibility, the software hooks into a marketplace for OKRs, insights (for example, metrics, tables, and charts), and add-ons from Gtmhub’s partners.
“[M]any enterprises are still siloed and there is little context into how each role and responsibility contributes to the organization’s success. Gtmhub’s platform restores agility, transparency and context to bridge the relationship between strategy and outcomes,” Osmak added. “Companies can attract talent from anywhere while keeping employees aligned with priorities, focused on outcomes rather than outputs, and engaged in cross-functional collaboration.”
Growth and challenges
In the enterprise, digital transformation — while often a source of growth — continues to present barriers to achieving certain goals during the pandemic. Over a third of executives in a recent survey report that they’ve missed a project deadline due to pandemic-related technology issues. Meanwhile, Great Place to Work found that 20% of executives have seen “mixed impacts” from remote work on productivity across teams and business units, with some improving and others suffering.
Responding to concerns about declining productivity, some employers have adopted monitoring technologies to ensure that employees remain on task. In a survey of employers, ExpressVPN found that 78% were using monitoring software to track their employees’ performance or online activity. Workers have generally responded poorly to this, unsurprisingly, with 59% in the ExpressVPN survey saying that they felt stress or anxiety as a result of their employer monitoring them.
Gtmhub and other OKR-tracking platforms, like WorkBoard, Ally.io, and Jellyfish, don’t necessarily fall into this category. But Gtmhub’s software does track employee-level metrics including “best achievement,” OKR progress statistics, OKR process data, and task details.
For its part, Gtmhub says by default, its employees don’t have access to client data and that client data is never processed on Gtmhub employee workstations or on-premises servers in the office, residing only on Microsoft Azure systems. (Gtmhub’s software is hosted on Azure.)
“The pandemic immediately shifted how and where employees worked. This meant more companies were adopting the Gtmhub platform to increase visibility while employees worked outside the office, and focus on outcomes, efficiency, and effectiveness,” Osmak continued.
Privacy concerns aside, 240-employee Gtmhub — which has over 1,000 enterprise and government customers including Adobe, TomTom, Red Hat, and Experian — says it’s primed for growth in the robust OKR software market. According to Verified Market Research, the sector could reach $1.84 billion by 2028 — climbing at a compound annual growth rate of 12.0% from $742 million in 2020. Osmak projects ending 2021 with three times year-over-year growth.
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