Monday.com, a proudly unprofitable workplace productivity tool, reaches $1.9 billion valuation with $150 million Series D

• Productivity tools startups Monday.com announced its $150 million Series D on Tuesday.
• The round, which was led by Sapphire Ventures, valued the unprofitable company at $1.9 billion, according to a source with knowledge of the deal.
• The funding comes during a fever-pitch of excitement around workplace productivity tools, with video conferencing company Zoom and chat app Slack outperforming expectations in recent public debuts.
• The funds will help the company achieve aggressive growth targets while they evaluate potentially going public, Monday.com cofounders Eran Zinman and Roy Mann told Business Insider.
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Turns out a case of the Mondays can be worth more than $1 billion.

Monday.com, a workplace productivity startup, announced on Tuesday that it closed $150 million in Series D funding led by Sapphire Ventures. A source with knowledge of the deal said the round valued the 7-year-old startup at $1.9 billion.

"Every round nowadays is competitive," Sapphire Ventures CEO and managing director Nino Marakovic told Business Insider. "It was a premium valuation for a premium company and that's what happens nowadays."

Even with newly minted unicorn status, Monday.com has yet to achieve profitability, according to cofounder and CEO Roy Mann.

"We are not aiming at profitability, we are aiming at growth," Mann told Business Insider. "I will say that we are one of the most cash flow efficient companies out there. We are very mindful about how we spend money and that is a comfort for investors."

Read More: Andreessen Horowitz partner Scott Kupor explains the valuable lesson that today's startups can learn from the dot-com bubble: Be careful about selling to other startups

Monday.com offers its users a wide range of automation and integration tools, similar to products like Zapier and Notion. But Mann and cofounder and CTO Eran Zinman took a page out of Slack's sales strategy by targeting employees as users instead of selling to a company's IT team after experiencing the challenges of managing quickly growing teams during their own stints at separate startups.

"Most of the tools we use in our personal lives are slick and cool because it's consumer stuff," Mann said. "When you come to business software, they are clunky, slow, have a lot of clicks and are not appealing. Essentially, the UI, ease of use, and empowerment of the user comes second all the time because it's sold to the business."

Monday.com's biggest selling point, according to Zinman, is in the flexibility it gives users to create their own tools and processes as an organization scales from tens of employees to over a hundred.

"When we were first building Monday.com, we spoke with a lot of managers to get a sense of how they manage the team and tools they would use, and it seemed like everyone had a secret Excel file that they used," Zinman said. "Excel is not meant to be used for management, but the fact that you can customize it to make it make sense to you is very powerful, so that's how we built the company."

The funding comes during a fever-pitch of excitement around workplace productivity tools, with video conferencing company Zoom and chat app Slack outperforming expectations in recent public debuts. Mann and Zinman told Business Insider that, although they now have the funds to explore new product offerings and markets, they are keeping one eye on the public markets.

"Looking at the growth ahead of us, it made a lot of sense to do another round right now," Zinman told Business Insider. "Another option is to potentially go public, which we have no concrete plans to do so right now, but the opportunity is so huge and that's definitely an option whenever we feel the time is right. This round gives us the flexibility to do that."

According to Mann, Monday.com has customers in over 200 industries from plane manufacturers to construction crews and hospitality teams. The 265-person team is split between Tel Aviv and New York, with plans to expand either in the United States or Europe and double headcount over the next year, Mann said.