Companies have access to a variety of analytics tools that can help them better understand their target audiences, but often the best means of finding out what’s on a user’s mind is simply to ask them. Qualtrics Inc. has spent the last 15 years trying to perfect the process.

The Utah-based firm made headlines today after securing a $180 million investment led by Insight Venture Partners and Accel with participation from Sequoia Capital. According to Fortune, one of the main ways in which Qualtrics plans to invest the funds is by making new acquisitions. The company, which has made only one buyout to date, will reportedly place a particular emphasis on companies with technology that can complement its recently introduced XM Platform.

Delivered from the cloud, the suite is the latest evolution of the feedback gathering technology that the provider has been developing since 2002. XM has readymade templates designed to streamline the task of designing surveys, supports more than 100 question types and provides the ability to publish polls through a wide range of mediums ranging from the web to text messages.

Then, once enough users have responded, a complementary set of analytics features can help companies quickly sift through their answers. According to Qualtrics, its platform automatically identifies the most important parts based on various business indicators and assign sentiment scores to the responses that can help provide a more nuanced understanding of users’ opinions. These features lend themselves to everything from surveying employee satisfaction to customer experience polls.

More than 8,500 organizations rely on Qualtrics for their feedback gathering operations, including over 65 percent of the Fortune 500. The company expects to cross the $250 million revenue mark by the end of the year. Ryan Sweeney, a partner at Accel, went as far as to say in a statement that Qualtrics is “among the best-performing enterprise software companies we’ve ever worked with.”

The venture capital firm is putting its money where its mouth is. Accel has bet more money on Qualtrics than any other portfolio company to date. Its total raised now stands at a hefty $400 million.

Image: Qualtrics