SteelBrick, the quote-to-cash cloud service aimed primarily at small- and mid-market companies, announced a $48 million Series C round today.
Quote-to-cash, as the name implies, is the part of the sales cycle that takes over once you have an interested customer. While CRM tools like Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics provide a way to maintain the basic customer record, a service like SteelBrick helps you put together a quote, sign a contract when the customer has decided to buy, and take care of billing once the deal is done.
The tool is built on the Salesforce App Cloud (formerly Salesforce 1) development platform.
Apttus, a similar company also built on App Cloud, that aims at the enterprise side of the market, snared $108 million in September. For all the talk of investments slowing down, these two companies, and this market segment, seems be to defying that bit of conventional wisdom.
It could be because it’s part of a large market, and businesses are increasingly seeing quote-to-cash as a critical investment, SteelBrick CEO Godard Abel told TechCrunch. “Our competitors are growing as well — it’s a hot space. We saw this at the Dreamforce conference last month where several of the largest sponsors and booths were focused on quote-to-cash, including SteelBrick as a Titanium sponsor,” he said.
Today’s investment round was led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), with what the company called “substantial participation” from existing investors Emergence Capital, Salesforce Ventures and Shasta Ventures.
It’s worth noting that Salesforce Ventures has invested heavily in both Apttus and SteelBrick. It would seem that Salesforce could take over this part of the cycle if it were so inclined, but when asked about this last month at Dreamforce, a Salesforce executive insisted it had no interest in this market. Instead, it seems content to let its venture arm invest in partner companies like SteelBrick, built on top of the Salesforce platform, and let them handle it.
With today’s investment, the company has raised over $77 million, $66 million of which it collected in two rounds this year alone.
SteelBrick, which has been primarily known for configure, price and quote part of the sales cycle, completed the quote-to-cash trifecta last month when it purchased Invoice IT, and changed the product’s name to SteelBrick Billing.
The company sees its target market as organizations with 1-3500 employees. It claims it can get a customer live in 5-10 weeks, which it also sees as a product differentiator.
SteelBrick currently has 350 customers including Cloudera, Jive, Marketo and Nutanix.