Gong (company)
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Last reviewed
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Gong (legally Gong.io, Inc.) is an American-Israeli software company that builds a revenue-intelligence platform: cloud software that records, transcribes, and analyzes sales calls, video meetings, and emails using artificial intelligence to coach sales representatives, surface risks in deals, and forecast revenue. Founded in 2015 by Amit Bendov and Eilon Reshef, the company popularized the term "revenue intelligence" as a software category positioned as the analytics layer that sits alongside customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Gong is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with its primary research and development center in Tel Aviv, Israel. After a rapid run of venture rounds, it reached a $7.25 billion valuation in a June 2021 Series E and, by 2026, reported an annual recurring revenue (ARR) run rate of more than $500 million serving over 5,000 customers worldwide.
Gong was founded in 2015 by Amit Bendov, who serves as chief executive officer, and Eilon Reshef, who serves as chief product officer. Both were experienced enterprise-software entrepreneurs. Before Gong, Bendov had been CEO of the business-analytics company Sisense and had held senior roles at Panaya and ClickSoftware, companies that collectively grew to more than $1 billion in value. Reshef had co-founded Webcollage, a software-as-a-service platform used by major consumer brands.
The idea grew out of a problem Bendov experienced as a CEO. According to the company's own account, one of his earlier companies had its worst quarter ever and the leadership could not explain why, because revenue decisions were being made on partial, secondhand information about what customers were actually saying. Bendov contacted Reshef to explore whether machine learning could be used to capture and understand real customer conversations at scale. The result was software that automatically records and transcribes sales interactions and then analyzes them to identify what separates winning deals from losing ones.
The company describes its product category as "revenue intelligence," distinguishing it from the narrower "conversation intelligence" framing it used in its earliest years. The corporate entity is registered in the United States as Gong.io, Inc., while the bulk of engineering work is done in Israel, a structure common to Israeli-founded enterprise startups.
Gong raised a large amount of venture capital over roughly five years, moving from a small seed-style first round in 2016 to a Series E that valued it at $7.25 billion in 2021. The cumulative totals below are the figures Gong stated in its own funding announcements.
| Round | Date | Amount | Lead investor(s) | Reported valuation | Cumulative funding |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Series A | June 2016 | $6 million | Norwest Venture Partners; Shlomo Kramer | Not disclosed | $6 million |
| Series A1 | July 2017 | $20 million | Norwest Venture Partners; Shlomo Kramer (existing); new: Wing Venture Capital, NextWorld Capital | Not disclosed | ~$26 million |
| Series B | February 2019 | $40 million | Battery Ventures | Not disclosed | $68 million |
| Series C | December 2019 | $65 million | Sequoia Capital | Not disclosed | $134 million |
| Series D | August 2020 | $200 million | Coatue | $2.2 billion | $334 million |
| Series E | June 2021 | $250 million | Franklin Templeton | $7.25 billion | $584 million |
The initial $6 million round in June 2016 was led by Norwest Venture Partners together with Check Point co-founder Shlomo Kramer; some sources describe it as a seed round while Gong labeled it Series A. In July 2017, Gong added a $20 million Series A1, with existing backers Norwest and Kramer joined by new investors Wing Venture Capital and NextWorld Capital. At that point the company said it was doubling revenue for four consecutive quarters and had been named a Gartner "Cool Vendor" in CRM sales.
The $40 million Series B, announced in February 2019, was led by Battery Ventures, with general partner Dharmesh Thakker citing Battery's view that "ninety-five percent of what happens in sales conversations today gets lost." Existing investors Norwest, Kramer, Wing, NextWorld, and Cisco Investments also took part. Ten months later, in December 2019, Sequoia Capital led a $65 million Series C; Sequoia partner Carl Eschenbach (a former president and chief operating officer of VMware) joined the board and described Gong's platform as potentially "the next big evolution after CRM." At the time, Gong reported roughly 700 customers, 45,000 sales professionals using the platform, and that it had grown revenue 5x in 2018.
The pace accelerated sharply during the COVID-19 period. In August 2020, Coatue led a $200 million Series D at a $2.2 billion valuation, making Gong a "unicorn" for the first time and bringing total funding to $334 million; participants included Index Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Thrive Capital, and existing investors such as Sequoia, Battery, Norwest, and Wing. Gong said it had more than 1,100 customers, over 64,000 platform users, and had grown revenue 2.5x year to date in 2020. Less than a year later, in June 2021, Franklin Templeton led a $250 million Series E at a $7.25 billion valuation, pushing cumulative funding to $584 million. Existing investors Coatue, Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia, Thrive Capital, and Tiger Global participated. Gong reported that it had grown ARR 2.3x between the first quarter of 2020 and the first quarter of 2021 and had passed 2,000 customers, including three Fortune 20 companies.
Gong has made at least two small acquisitions to add talent and technology rather than scale:
Like many software companies that raised aggressively during the 2020-2021 boom, Gong cut staff as growth slowed. On February 8, 2023, Gong laid off about 80 employees, roughly 7 percent of its workforce. In a message titled "A Difficult Company Update," CEO Amit Bendov said the reductions hit customer success, sales, and general and administrative roles, and that no cuts were made in research and development, product, or marketing. The company attributed the move to slower-than-expected growth and a tougher macroeconomic environment, and said it expected not to need further reductions that year.
Although the $7.25 billion Series E remained Gong's last priced primary round, its shares traded lower on the private secondary market as the broader software-multiple correction set in. In November 2025, reporting from the Israeli technology press described advanced-stage secondary transactions, conducted through Nasdaq's private market platform and involving employees and investors, at a valuation of about $4.5 billion. That implied roughly a 38 percent markdown from the Series E mark. Gong said that as a private company it did not engage in speculation about such transactions and indicated it had not formally approved them.
Gong has repeatedly been discussed as an initial public offering (IPO) candidate. In March 2025, the company disclosed that it had crossed $300 million in ARR, which observers framed as a milestone consistent with an eventual public listing. Bendov characterized the company as "nearly profitable" and said it still held most of the cash from its 2021 Series E, which it had "almost haven't touched." He also downplayed the urgency of going public, saying that "an IPO is very interesting but not the most important thing" and that the company was focused on building products. As of mid-2026, Gong had not announced a target date for an offering.
Gong markets its software as a "Revenue AI" platform (more recently described as a revenue AI operating system) built on top of what it calls the Gong Revenue Graph, a continuously updated map of an organization's customer interactions across calls, video meetings, and emails. The platform is generally grouped into several product areas:
| Product | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Conversation intelligence | Automatic call and meeting recording, transcription, and analysis; coaching, talk-ratio and topic detection, and call scorecards |
| Deal and Forecast intelligence | Deal-risk surfacing, pipeline inspection, and AI-assisted revenue forecasting |
| Gong Engage | Sales-engagement tooling: email, dialer, and automated outreach workflows driven by AI |
| Gong Enable | Sales enablement and coaching tied to real customer interactions |
The conversation-intelligence core is the original product: Gong connects to web-conferencing tools, telephony systems, and email, then captures and transcribes interactions and analyzes them to identify objections, competitor mentions, next steps, and buying signals. Deal and Forecast intelligence apply that captured data to predict which deals will close and to flag pipeline risk, positioning Gong as a complement to, and a check on, the data that sales reps manually enter into a CRM.
Gong launched Gong Engage, a sales-engagement product, on June 8, 2023, and made it generally available in the summer of 2023. Engage extends Gong from analyzing interactions after the fact to driving outbound activity, combining email, a dialer, and multi-step workflows with AI-generated guidance. Features such as assisted writing use Gong's generative models, trained on captured interactions, to help representatives personalize messages without rewriting them from scratch. The launch positioned Gong against dedicated sales-engagement vendors.
Gong's central claim is that its machine learning is grounded in an unusually large and specific corpus of real sales interactions, which the company frames as a data moat. The platform combines several families of AI:
Smart Trackers are a user-trainable feature, introduced in 2022, that moves beyond simple keyword matching to concept-based detection. Where a basic tracker fires on specific words, a Smart Tracker is designed to recognize a business concept (such as a pricing objection or a competitor being discussed) across the many different ways people phrase it. Gong has claimed Smart Trackers are roughly three times more accurate than off-the-shelf, keyword-based analysis. Independent reviewers have noted that, like any classifier, Smart Trackers can still miss nuanced or unusual phrasing.
Gong has built a set of generative-AI features on top of its captured-interaction data:
Gong's more recent work has moved toward agentic AI. In product announcements during 2026, the company introduced purpose-built AI agents for revenue teams as part of what it now calls the Gong Revenue AI operating system:
Gong has also added support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), enabling its data and agents to interoperate with external systems and assistants, with integrations spanning tools such as Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Because Gong's models are trained on billions of real interactions, the company emphasizes domain-specific accuracy as a differentiator over generic assistants. Gong publishes guidance on measuring AI performance in its product and has framed the breadth of its interaction dataset (described variously as billions to tens of billions of analyzed interactions) as the asset that makes its sales-specific predictions and summaries reliable. As with most enterprise AI, the practical accuracy of transcription and concept detection varies with audio quality, accents, and how a given concept is phrased.
Gong sells primarily to mid-market and enterprise revenue organizations, and its customer base and revenue grew quickly through the early 2020s.
| Date | ARR / run rate | Customers | Source framing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Q1 2021 | 2.3x ARR growth vs. Q1 2020 | 2,000+ | Series E announcement |
| January 2025 | ~$300 million ARR | 4,500+ | Reported March 2025 |
| May 2026 | $500 million+ run rate | 5,000+ | Company announcement |
In March 2025, Gong said it had crossed $300 million in ARR, up sharply from prior years, and named customers such as Google, LinkedIn, Canva, and Square (Block). In a May 12, 2026 announcement, the company said its ARR run rate had topped $500 million with year-over-year growth above 55 percent, and listed customers including ADP, Anthropic, Canva, Cisco, DocuSign, Google, Paycor, Thomson Reuters, Uber for Business, and Chime. Gong cited customer-reported outcomes such as a 64 percent seller-productivity increase at Anthropic, a 60 percent rep-capacity increase at Canva, and a 32 percent lift in response rates at Uber for Business. Bendov framed the growth as a shift in the market "from the AI experimentation phase to broad implementation."
Gong competes in a crowded revenue- and conversation-intelligence market that includes companies such as Clari, Chorus (acquired by ZoomInfo), Salesloft, and Outreach, as well as the native AI features increasingly added by CRM vendors like Salesforce. Industry reviewers and analysts have recognized Gong's products, including naming it "Best AI-Based Solution for Sales" in the 2024 AI Breakthrough Awards.
| Name | Role |
|---|---|
| Amit Bendov | Co-founder and CEO |
| Eilon Reshef | Co-founder and Chief Product Officer |
| Tim Ritters | Chief Financial Officer |
| Emily He | Chief Marketing Officer |
| Shane Evans | Chief Revenue Architect |
| Sandi Kochhar | Chief People Officer |
| Joe FitzGerald | Chief Legal Officer |