We are excited to announce the closing of Beacon’s $56 million Series C funding round, led by experienced global growth investor Warburg Pincus. This round was joined by existing investors, including Centana Growth Partners, Global Atlantic Financial Group and PIMCO, and we are fortunate to have attracted the strategic participation of Blackstone Innovations Investments, who are also a Beacon client. These investments and partnerships will play a big role in bringing Beacon to a bigger audience and broader customer base, providing both funds and expertise that will help us grow and scale effectively.

Beacon at age seven is enjoying a major growth spurt, with all of the company’s key metrics hitting new records. In the past year, we have grown our client base by more than 60 percent, tripled the number of sales and services partners, and increased annual recurring revenue by more than 100 percent. At this point we are past the startup phase and well into the scale-up phase. Having surpassed our own stretch goals, we embarked on and completed this Series C funding round. We will keep aiming high, focusing on hiring the best people and building our organization to support continued growth.

Aiming High

When I joined Beacon four years ago it was already a dynamic, high growth company. Since then we have worked diligently to accelerate our sales growth and product execution, while nurturing our company culture. To support our growth trajectory, we have expanded our sales pipeline and evolved the supporting processes. We developed a cohesive customer-facing organization, from business development and lead generation, through sales and sales engineering, and to implementation, customer success and technical support. As a company that prides ourselves on technical excellence and helping clients build for the future, we put a strong emphasis on our product and service capabilities. The result is a strong growth trajectory that is exceeding expectations, and a future of broader availability of best-in-class technology throughout financial markets. 

Of course, none of this is possible without the exceptional team that is building the future of the financial markets on the cloud. While the scale of Beacon’s business has changed in the past few years, our culture has remained the same. We continue to be a group of technical, customer-focused, caring, smart and collaborative people, with lots of opportunities for personal and career growth. 

Hiring Well

Evolving from a startup means shifting from a small group where everyone wears many hats to one with more focused roles, where people can be empowered to shape and build their own teams and areas of responsibility. High growth means hiring a lot of people and investing even more in our internal talent. The company is actively recruiting from around the world, growing from 69 employees at the end of 2019 to 152 today, with over 30 open positions as of writing this blog. 

An important part of our people strategy is the recruitment and development of exceptional engineering talent. As the financial industry accelerates its adoption of cloud computing, we have tremendous opportunities to solve not just the challenges that are here today, but the bigger ones that are coming next. Throughout our organization, we hire individuals and build teams, not just fill roles. We invest in our people to help them develop their own skills and also provide leadership opportunities for those who excel at building teams and optimizing processes. We take diversity and inclusion seriously – I’m proud to be part of an Executive Committee that is majority female, with an ever-increasing representation of women at all levels of our company. We strive to recruit, retain, and promote people from all backgrounds. We trust and respect our employees and have many options for flexible work. In this way, we are building a strong foundation for scale while supporting individuals to find their best work/life balance. 

Looking Ahead

From the beginning, Beacon’s core value proposition has remained the same: from small hedge funds to global energy trading firms, asset managers, and investment banks, Beacon enables customers to focus on their proprietary analytics and differentiated services, significantly reducing the resources required to build and maintain technology stacks. Instead of spending the majority of their technical resources on common infrastructure, commoditized analytics, and the maintenance of “business as usual” applications, our customers delegate this work to the Beacon Platform. They can then free up resources to develop and extend their own intellectual property, including proprietary data, analytics, and applications. The result is much faster deployment of commercial value for 20-30 percent of the cost.

As we look ahead, we are excited to bring the benefits of the Beacon platform to a growing customer base by making it even easier to deploy and extend. To further add value to our customers and build the Beacon developer community, we are making it easy to integrate third party data, analytics and apps on our forthcoming Beacon App Store. We are continuing to build on our success across market segments, industry verticals, and geographies. Our amazing team, recent funding round, and investment in our product make it possible for us to accelerate and deepen our work in these areas.