This article appears in the Winter 2019 issue of Silicon Slopes Magazine.
By Karl Sun, CEO, Lucidchart.
The increasing complexity of work and our jobs today means that we are in the midst of a massive shift in the skills people need to succeed. The value of an employee is largely found in their ability to understand and share ideas, information, and processes that help a company innovate. Yet clarity of thought and communication is often a barrier to the speed of innovation.
At Lucid, we believe that if we can help everyone see that developing and communicating ideas clearly means working visually, we can eliminate this barrier and empower people to work more efficiently and productively.
In 2018, we took a bold step forward toward this goal, becoming the standard for understanding and communicating with clarity. Millions of workers turned to Lucidchart because legacy applications simply could not provide the functionality and comprehension necessary to get their work done.
In the last 12 months we’ve grown our visual productivity platform, successfully expanded internationally, and further developed and refined our products. Lucidchart grew from 10 million to over 15 million users, and now attracts 700,000 new users per month. Notably, 96 percent of the Fortune 500 now use Lucidchart.
More and more people across the globe are reaching for Lucidchart over the common office application suite because they are able to explain their work clearly in one place, when they might have previously needed two or more applications. We now have users from over 180 countries and power visual productivity in seven languages. In fact, one-third of Lucidchart’s revenue now comes from international users. And to better serve our fast-growing global user base, we capped off 2018 by announcing our EMEA headquarters in Amsterdam, which will open in the new year.
We also achieved great progress in making Lucidchart more robust and easier to use across all business functions. For example, we introduced the Lucidchart Sales Solution to empower sales orgs to close bigger deals faster as they visualize their accounts and standardize sales processes across the entire team. Further product development and expansion will continue to be crucial to our success. We plan to introduce capabilities that will make it possible to automatically create diagrams and merge visuals with external data sources, further enhancing the experience of working visually.
Finally, we added over 100 new employees to our ever-growing team, and this might be our greatest achievement. We bring together the most talented people we can find, but they are also the most down-to-earth people you’ll ever meet. With that kind of caliber and quality of people, everyone is motivated and empowered in their work. It’s because of them that we’re continually honored with workplace awards, including Great Place to Work and Fortune’s Best Small & Medium Workplaces and Utah Business’ Best Companies to Work For.
As we enter our ninth year in business, we’re eager to introduce Lucidchart and Lucidpress to millions of additional users worldwide and continue to provide a great experience for our users. And after closing a $72 million round of funding from Meritech Capital, ICONIQ Capital and Spectrum Equity, we can now double down and accelerate our growth, going more aggressively after the opportunity in front of us. We have more conviction than ever before about the problem we are solving, the market opportunity, and our vision.
The future of work flows through Lucidchart and Lucidpress. Every day, we get more excited about the opportunity to redefine workplace productivity for this generation and help people unleash their creativity and innovation. And we’re proud to work alongside so many other wonderful companies that are continually bolstering the Silicon Slopes ecosystem.
