Accelerating the Decade of Ecosystems: WorkSpan $30 Million Series C Led by Insight Partners

Back in 2014, partnering was dominated by resell partners operating as an extension of an organization's direct sales business. While this model fit the days of physical distribution, dramatic changes were happening. The shift to cloud was causing a fundamental change in how companies were building, marketing and selling together. New partnerships were being formed, new offers were being built, new campaigns were being innovated and field sales had started co-selling with partners.

While the world was changing and build-market-sell motions had evolved, partnering technology had not kept up. Partner ecosystems were struggling to achieve partner trust, scalability, and visibility – working on borrowed tools from Sales and IT.

We were inspired to found WorkSpan to bring partnering technology to the changing world. We laid out our mission to be:

1. Make Partnerships an Engine for Growth:
   Remove impediments to partnering and make modern ecosystem partnering successful.
2. Build a Platform for Ecosystems:
   Connect partners and standardize data exchange and cross-company workflows to make ecosystems truly plug-n-play.
3. Create a Value Network:
   Bring all partnering organizations together to share expertise, resources and deliver better value to customers.

“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”
- Albert Einstein

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Since WorkSpan’s founding, we’ve seen this mission motivating 3-founders in a room into a full fledged worldwide movement.

We are now firmly in the “Decade of Ecosystems” movement where companies across the technology landscape are racing to build their partner ecosystems to grow their shared markets. We have defined best practices, served as change agents, and grown as support staff for industry leaders to execute on their key initiatives.

We now power 6 of the world’s top technology ecosystems, managing over 9,000 ecosystem partnering companies, $50 Billion of co-sell pipeline and $1 Billion in incentive funds.

WorkSpan is now the #1 partner network empowering companies to scale co-sell revenue growth with their partner ecosystem – including AWS, Cisco, Google, Microsoft, SAP and more.

• Co-Sell with partners, including top cloud hyperscalers, to accelerate measurable revenue growth
• Co-Innovate with partners to bring joint solutions to market 6x faster
• Co-Market to bring those joint solutions to market and fairly distribute leads to partners
• Co-Invest to align incentives between partners across the full customer lifecycle

Today, I am delighted to announce that WorkSpan has raised $30 Million in Series C funding round that was led by visionary investor Ganesh Bell, Managing Director at Insight Partners with participation from Mayfield and M12, Microsoft’s venture fund.

Business Insider: Startup WorkSpan raised $30 million to keep growing as it helps top tech companies like Microsoft, Cisco, and SAP manage relationships with partners

We will be investing all of it back into our customers – building ways to deliver more value to companies we serve, servicing and supporting them in delivering outcomes with their ecosystem partners. Our customers’ success is our success. And our milestones are a testament to their trust in us.

Over the past 8 years, we have witnessed a tremendous growth in momentum. And yet, I foresee that the next 4 years will just dwarf today’s status as ecosystems become the #1 reliable contributor to revenue growth. That is an amazing goal for us to work towards!

The future holds great promise. We are on a continuous journey to innovate and deliver. A big shout-out to our strong team, our own partners and our advisors – here’s to many more years of delivering new capabilities that drive partner revenue growth for our valued customers.Happy Partnering!