Qualtrics is the dominant experience management platform, covering customer experience, employee experience, product experience, and brand experience. Ryan Smith founded it in 2002 in his parents’ basement in Provo, Utah. The company bootstrapped for over a decade before taking its first outside investment in 2012.
SAP acquired Qualtrics for $8 billion in 2019, just days before a planned IPO. SAP then took Qualtrics public again in 2021 at a $15 billion valuation. In 2023, Silver Lake and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board took Qualtrics private again at a $12.5 billion valuation. The company’s valuation journey is one of the most dramatic in enterprise software.
The platform’s foundation is sophisticated survey technology. But calling Qualtrics a survey tool is like calling Salesforce a contact database. The system collects experience data through surveys, feedback widgets, social listening, chat analysis, call center transcripts, and third-party integrations, then uses AI (XM/os) to identify trends, predict outcomes, and recommend actions.
CustomerXM captures feedback at every touchpoint and identifies at-risk customers before they churn. EmployeeXM tracks engagement, onboarding experience, and exit feedback. The platform processes billions of experience signals annually and serves thousands of enterprise customers including more than 85% of the Fortune 100.
Qualtrics’ text analytics engine uses natural language processing to analyze open-ended responses at scale, identifying topics, sentiment, and intensity. Pricing is enterprise-only and typically runs well into six figures annually. The company employs over 6,000 people globally and generates annual revenue exceeding $1.5 billion.
