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Sacra estimates that Gong hit $298M annual recurring revenue (ARR) in 2024, up 28% from $232M ARR in 2022.

Gong re-accelerated revenue growth in 2024 after a slowdown in growth in 2022 and 2023 related to headwinds related to sales teams downsizing across the industry, which led to significant headwinds for their per-seat pricing model and declines in net dollar retention.

Compare to Outreach at $250M ARR in 2023, up 11% from $225M ARR in 2022 for a 17.6x forward revenue multiple on their $4.4B valuation (June 2021), and Apollo at $96M ARR in 2023, up 100% from $48M in 2022 for a 16.6x forward revenue multiple on their $1.6B valuation (August 2023).

With the dramatic rise in sales video calls post-COVID, Gong expanded from a 1:1 coaching tool to a 1:many data store and system of record for sales activity in a company.

Gong was last valued at $7.25B as of their 2021 Series E. Based on 2021 ARR of $135M, was valued at a 53.7x revenue multiple. The company has raised $583M in total funding. Key strategic investors include Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures.

Gong launched in 2015 as pair programming for sales teams, giving reps instant video replays of their sales calls for peer coaching.

With the dramatic rise in sales video calls post-COVID, Gong expanded from a 1:1 coaching tool to a 1:many data store and system of record for sales activity in a company.

Today, Gong is the place where every customer call at a company gets stored for rewatching.

Companies add a Gong extension to their Outlook or Google Calendar settings, and Gong automatically finds upcoming sales calls and demos to record. Then, when a rep gets on one of those Gong-tagged calls, a silent Gong bot joins the meeting to record audio, video, and any chat or screenshares.

After the call, Gong transcribes the calls and stores them in S3—from there, companies can look back at old sales calls for insights, check out Gong's collected analytics and insights pulled from their calls, and review aggregate-level data on sales rep and pipeline performance.

Gong is a subscription SaaS platform company that prices based on the number of seats that a company needs. Pricing ranges from roughly $1,600 per user per year for small teams (3-49 users) to $1,360 per user per year for over 250 users, with discounts from 5% to 15% applied as the number of users increases.

A yearly platform subscription of $5,000 gets companies unlimited Collaborator seats, unlimited storage, trainings, a customer success manager, and unlimited data exports.

Gong’s core offering includes two seat types: Collaborator (free) and Standard (paid). The Collaborator seat provides basic functionalities such as call listening and access to alerts, libraries, and comments, while the Standard seat includes features like deal boards, team statistics, coaching recommendations, and call scoring.

Gong's core video recording and analytics feature has become a part of every sales product, from HubSpot (CRM) to Pipedrive (CRM), Apollo (go-to-market), Zoominfo (go-to-market), Clari (forecasting), Outreach (sales automation), 6sense (account-based marketing), and Gainsight (customer success).

Sales platforms monetize call recordings by using it as a usage-based value metric, driving upgrades to higher pricing tiers in their core per-seat subscription SaaS business model.

As this "Gongification" has spread across SaaS, developer middleware has emerged to enable products to easily ingest video and make it useful, from Recall.ai (universal API for meeting bots) to Deepgram (API for transcription), Gladia (API for translation), AssemblyAI (API for text summarization) and Pinecone (vector embeddings for search).

These APIs allow teams to integrate video calls, leveraging existing widespread usage of meeting bots from Zoom, Google Meet and WebEx, rather than building native video experiences as with tools like Mux or Daily.co.

A big trend we're seeing today is that companies are applying the Gong playbook in areas of SaaS that have nothing to do with sales.

Companies are building products that ingest and automatically pull insights out of videos for everything from hiring (Metaview, $7.6M in funding), project management (Spinach.io, $5.2M in funding), and team productivity (Fellow, $30.5M in funding).

What this evolution hinges on is the fact that video data—from the 5+ trillion minutes of video calls per year and counting—is a massive net new source of high-bandwidth insights.

That data is increasingly feeding into every B2B SaaS tool because of how it can power AI-based analytics, discovery and engagement features.

Zoom (NASDAQ: ZM) launched Zoom for Sales & Revenue to go after companies like Gong and HubSpot and video-adjacent enterprise workflows around sales, success, and productivity.

But while Zoom dominated the COVID era by being the only company to offer reliable cross-platform video chat at <150ms latency, video chat has been commoditized since then, and Zoom has struggled to transition into a product company and build this productivity suite around their ownership of live video.

Zoom grew 326% year-over-year in 2021 and had 300 million users logging in every day for meetings—as of 2023, growth has nearly flatlined at 4% year-over-year as they compete with vertical SaaS and Microsoft Office (NASDAQ: MSFT) to own with their all-in-one platform product.