MURAL Closes $118M For Visual Collaboration Tool

Lots of people are visual learners, and with many people working remotely now, it is not as easy to collaborate.

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Meet MURAL, a San Francisco-based company developing a digital workspace for visual thinking and remote collaboration. The company closed a $118 million Series B round of funding on Tuesday.

Insight Partners led the investment and was joined by Tiger Global Management, Slack Fund, World Innovation Lab and a group of individual investors.

Prior to this round, MURAL had raised a total of $24.3 million, including a $23 million Series A secured in July 2019, according to Mariano Suarez-Battan, MURAL’s co-founder and CEO. The startup was founded in 2011.

As part of the investment, Jeff Lieberman, managing director at Insight Partners, has joined MURAL’s board of directors while Nikhil Sachdev, also a managing director at Insight, joined the board as an observer.

“Insight has been politely persistent in wanting to work with MURAL for a while,” Sachdev said in an interview. “What we saw over the last couple of months is that MURAL has defined itself as the leading visual collaboration platform that helps companies accelerate the adoption of imagination at work. We are excited because this visual software collaboration category is large, impacted by our move to remote work, and is truly horizontal. We envision everyone using this.”

What you need to know

More than an online whiteboard, MURAL integrates with common workplace productivity apps that enable clients to access a digital workspace for product strategy and planning, research and design collaboration, sales and consulting engagements, and facilitates workshops that use agile and design-thinking methodologies.

After securing the Series A funding last year, MURAL set out to grow, using the funding to double its headcount by adding talent in engineering, sales and marketing, as well as its leadership; hiring a CFO and CMO, Suarez-Batten said in an interview with Crunchbase News.

He said he also saw signs of demand from enterprise companies, and now the startup boasts such clients as IBM, Autodesk, Intuit, GitHub and Atlassian, each with up to tens of thousands of employees collaborating via MURAL each month.

With the Series B funding, it will be more of the same: Working on the product, expanding its go-to-market strategy, supporting customers and hiring more talent to be proactive with demand, Suarez-Batten said.

MURAL has meanwhile tripled annual revenue year over year and added more than 1 million monthly active users globally so far this year, he added.

Next steps for MURAL

The company had a lot of patience in waiting for the market to catch up to its technology, Suarez-Batten said. Now that it has, the company is ready to scale globally. It will be hiring more product teams in the Americas and Western Europe.

“We are now focused on selling to customers that are growing through revenue,” he added. “The trends are all aligned: Visual methods are very popular and remote work is the standard. We now argue what happens afterwards. I don’t see the digital component ever going away.”

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias