Dive Brief:

• Digital adoption platform provider Whatfix secured $125 million in a Series E funding round led by Warburg Pincus, with participation from existing investor SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, a venture capital fund managed by the Japanese bank, according to a Wednesday announcement.

• The investment will allow Whatfix to enhance its product suite through organic growth and strategic acquisitions and to expand its market presence globally, including in the U.S., the startup said.

• “Enterprises are grappling with the complexities of digital transformation and the ever-increasing pressure to deliver exceptional user experiences,” Whatfix CEO Khadim Batti said in a press release.

Dive Insight:

The announcement comes as businesses scramble to keep pace with rapid innovations in areas such as artificial intelligence.

The number of U.S. companies investing at least $10 million in AI is expected to rise to 30% in 2025, a nearly two-fold increase compared with this year’s level, according to survey findings published in July by Big Four accounting firm Ernst & Young.

Whatfix is part of an emerging sector that supports digital transformations by, for example, streamlining and accelerating how employees or customers engage with newly deployed software applications. Seventy percent of organizations are projected to use a so-called digital adoption platform like Whatfix by 2025, according to a 2023 Gartner report shared with CFO Dive.

“This rapid expansion is driven by several key factors, including the urgent need for accelerated digital transformation, the increasing complexity of enterprise software, a focus on improving user adoption and experience and the demand for better return on investment,” Batti said in an email response to questions.

“Looking ahead, the DAP market is expected to evolve towards more AI-driven, personalized experiences with deeper enterprise system integration, shifting from basic guidance to predictive, context-aware assistance that proactively enhances user productivity,” the CEO added.

The Whatfix product suite, which leverages generative AI, is designed to help organizations boost user productivity and improve the user experience of both internal and customer-facing applications, according to the release.

Batti said the company seeks to “maximize the technology ROI of large-scale digital transformations in enterprises by addressing pain points across the entire application lifecycle — from ideation to training to deployment.”

The product suite has demonstrated a 35% increase in employee productivity, 60% reduction in training time and costs, 50% decrease in employee case tickets, and 20% increase in application data accuracy, he said.

The global company, which was founded in 2014 and is dual-headquartered in San Jose, California and Bengaluru, India, has raised $270 million to date, Batti said. It currently supports more than 700 enterprises, including Shell, Microsoft and UPS Supply Chain Solutions, according to the release.