Accel Partners heads down to Georgia to invest in DecisionLink, leading an $18.5 million round

DecisionLink, an Atlanta-based company that provides software for cost-benefit analyses of business services from a customer's perspective, has managed to woo one of Silicon Valley's top venture firms to invest in its latest $18.5 million round of funding.

Accel Partners has a long-standing reputation as one of the Bay Area's premier investment firms, and it's leading DecisionLink's latest round. Their investment comes on the heels of billion dollar valuations for Atlanta companies like Calendly, Greenlight Financial Technologies, OneTrust, and the $800 million acquisition of Kabbage.

Atlanta startups are on fire

Calendly - raising at $3B valuation
OneTrust - $2.5B valuation
Greenlight - $1B+ valuation
Kabbage - just sold for $800M.

We have hit an inflection point in Atlanta - the next 10 years are going to be really runs

- Romeen Sheth (@RomeenSheth) November 19, 2020

Other investors in the round included George Kurtz, the president and chief executive of CrowdStrike, and George Roberts, a partner at OpenView Venture Partners and the former executive vice president of North American sales at Oracle.

Value Management [sic] as a practice is now a C-suite priority and increasingly considered an enterprise-critical function alongside software systems like CRM, marketing automation, and project management," said Sameer Gandhi, Partner, Accel, in a statement. In 2019, we invested in a SAFE round in DecisionLink because we believed in the market opportunity for scalable [value management]. Now, we have been so impressed by DecisionLink's execution and its ability to drive this transformation on behalf of customers, that we are excited to lead its Series A round."

Businesses are constantly looking for ways to benchmark themselves against their competitors or find new ways to better service them. Most of these strategies don't take off, or are variations on a theme, but value management seems to have legs - especially given the accessibility of all kinds of benchmarking data points that are publicly available.

Accel-backed portfolio companies like CrowdStrike, PagerDuty, and DocuSign are using the service and so are companies like ServiceNow, Marketo, NCR, and VMWare.

These are big names in enterprise software, and the signal that their adoption of DecisionLink's software provided must have played a role in Accel's decision to invest.