Who Owns Qualtrics?

Qualtrics began in 2002 in Provo, Utah. BYU marketing professor Scott Smith and his son Ryan built a research survey tool for universities, later joined by Ryan's brother Jared and Stuart Orgill. The family self-funded the company for a decade, growing to millions in revenue on academic and corporate research customers without taking a dollar of venture capital.

The 2012 Series A changed everything: $70 million from Accel and Sequoia, among the largest first rounds in software history at the time. Rounds of $150 million and $180 million followed as the product expanded from surveys into what the company branded experience management, or XM, covering customer, employee, brand, and product research on one platform.

SAP's surprise $8 billion acquisition in November 2018 came days before a planned IPO. Two years later SAP reversed and spun Qualtrics out on NASDAQ under the ticker XM in January 2021, keeping majority ownership. The public run lasted barely two years: Silver Lake and CPP Investments completed the $12.5 billion take-private in June 2023.

Private ownership brought aggressive expansion. The Press Ganey Forsta deal, announced October 2025 and closed May 2026, added the dominant patient experience measurement business in US healthcare and its network of 41,000 provider organizations. The integration also brought restructuring, including August 2026 layoffs that eliminated several hundred positions across the combined company.