Impressive 2020 growth as a preview of Extend's massive long-term potential
2020 was a challenging year for many of us, and my heart goes out to all who faced serious struggles or loss. I was proud to see how the Extend team met the challenges of the year, and I am personally energized to kick off the new year and hope that we see real progress across multiple fronts including the pandemic, social justice, politics, and more.
During the pandemic the eCommerce industry underwent explosive growth as we saw more and more consumers shift to buying online. Extend was a beneficiary of this new buying behavior, as merchants were keen to integrate functionality that drove new revenue and gave their customers greater peace of mind when making purchase decisions.
In only our second year of existence, and our first full year selling our best-in-class extended warranties and protection plans, Extend saw tremendous demand for our digitally native and data-driven offering. Simply put, eCommerce infrastructure like Extend is becoming a mission-critical piece of software for online brands, and all the work we did in 2020 has set us up for a breakout year in 2021. Let’s take a look at some of the highlights from last year...
Extend saw meaningful growth throughout the year across all our key business metrics, and we raised a $40M series B round of funding to support our rapid expansion.
Merchants
- Extend’s merchant partner base grew by more than 10x year-over-year
- Extend went live with many lighthouse partners in 2020 including Peloton, Advance Auto Parts, iRobot, L’Ange, Logitech, Harman / JBL, SoClean, JEGS, Crown and Caliber, and many more.
We thank our merchants for their continued partnership with us.
- In 2020 Extend launched with merchants on eCommerce platforms including Shopify, Big Commerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Magento, Hybris, IBM Websphere, and WooCommerce.
- Merchants who added Extend protection plans to their website saw an increase in overall purchase conversion rate. BlendJet saw an 11% increase in overall purchase conversion rate on their core products after they added Extend to their website.
- In 2020 we saw growth in protection plans sold in excess of 7,000% from January to December
- Consumers saw Extend protection plans offered alongside their favorite products more than 110 million times in 2020!
- Extend grew revenue by 4,950% in 2020 over 2019.
Team
Like many companies, Extend instituted a work from home policy in March 2020 and closed our offices in San Francisco, CA and Dallas, TX. Although we already had some team members who worked remotely, we were about to see how we would step up to the challenge of scaling a business in the middle of a pandemic. We were thrilled to see that productivity across all job functions increased, and the company quickly adapted and embraced a fully remote operational model. Efficiency is not everything, though. We also made great efforts to maintain our human connections and amazing team culture despite the all remote work environment.
One of the things I am most proud of is the fact that we grew from 25 to well over 100 people in 2020, and many of our new hires came as a result of referrals from current team members. Extend is a technology first company and over 50% of our team is made up of engineering, product, and design.
Extend attracted some key talent in 2020 including:
Kevin Tsui - VP Risk, Data, Analytics. Kevin joined Extend from Affirm where he held leadership positions in the data / machine learning, pricing / risk, and finance organizations. Kevin and his team are focused on building out our machine learning models and designing the data schemas that will provide deep insights into and controls over our business.
Matt Delauro - VP Solution Engineering. Matt has spent 15 years leading enterprise solution engineering teams at NetSuite and Epicor Software, where he worked with some of the largest eCommerce companies in the country. The knowledge and domain expertise of Matt and his team are second to none, and it has made it simple for merchants of all sizes to go live with Extend in record time.
Leah Thomas - Director of Recruiting. Leah has over 8 years of experience as a recruiter working for Facebook, Skillz, and other top Bay Area technology companies. Leah and her team have made a huge impact at Extend where we now regularly onboard 4-5 new hires each week in pursuit of our goal of growing to 200+ team members by the end of 2021.
Extend is succeeding in providing an up-leveled, AppleCare-like experience for consumers who buy our extended warranties. 2020 was a strong year for Extend as we solidified our core platform, partnered with hundreds of leading merchants, and attracted top talent to help us continue to scale our API-first, easy-to-integrate, extended warranty and protection plan platform.
In addition, Extend was recognized by Business Insider as one of 45 enterprise startups that will soar in 2021, called out as the next major point-of-sale trend by Protocol, partnered with Guardsman to service our furniture merchant partners, and raised over $40M from Meritech Capital, PayPal, and GreatPoint Ventures.
At Extend we think we are just scratching the surface of what we can become as a company, and how we can make extended warranties and protection plans easy to use for both merchants and consumers. I could not be more proud of what our team accomplished in the past year, and I look forward to seeing what we can do in 2021! Stay tuned...
We have open positions across all roles at Extend so please join us - WE ARE HIRING :-)!
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