The speed of business: qualtrics hits it big with fai-data.

• Author: Sorensen Dan

Every fire needs fuel, and Provo-based Qualtrics just stockpiled enough fuel to super-charge its already incredible growth. In late September, the company announced it had landed a $150 million Series B round of funding, led by Insight Venture Partners with significant participation from its original investors, Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital.

In announcing the deal, the investors pointed to Qualtrics' continued growth and--more impressive--consistent profitability.

"The ability to stay profitable while in hyper-growth is very difficult to do, and Qualtrics is one of those rare success stories," said Ryan Sweeney Accel Partners in a prepared statement. "Naturally, we'll invest in profitable, fast-growing companies with strong financials and great management teams all day long."

"Hyper-growth" is also how CEO Ryan Smith describes his company's trajectory. "We hired 200 employees last year; we hired 100 employees last quarter," he says.

"We're expanding internationally with multiple products, and now we have over 6,000 customers." The latest investment round will fuel continued expansion into new markets, as well as new product innovation. Indeed, Smith says there is no limit to the company's potential growth. Qualtrics' "insight platform" enables companies to gather real-time information from customers and employees. "We target absolutely every organization and every business in the world. We've got Qualtrics users from soccer moms asking about soccer practice to the world's biggest airlines and the world's biggest tech companies, and government agencies trying to find out what's going on with their websites or programs they've put in place. Ultimately, we're just helping organizations be right--and as many organizations that need to be right, that's how big our market is," says Smith.

FOUNDING PRINfIPLES'

Qualtrics grew out of a partnership between Smith and his father, Scott M. Smith, who was a professor at the Marriott School of Management at BYU. Scott Smith was developing a survey tool to use in his classes and for his own market research. Together, father and son realized they could forge a business around the concept.

The company's first clients were universities, which used the survey platform to conduct market research. At the time, online market research was still very foreign to most companies, but universities were beginning to take the plunge. Now, a decade later, Qualtrics offers a variety of products to meet the needs of almost any business or industry.

Over the years, says Smith, Qualtrics has operated by a set of three principles: no...