Enterprise mobile startup DoubleDutch has raised $4 million in Series B funding, in a new round led by Floodgate, with participation from Bullpen Capital and Lightbank. The funding will see Floodgate’s Mike Maples Jr. joining the company’s Board of Directors, as the company further focuses its efforts on deconstructing CRM software and porting it into mini-applications running on mobile.
Interestingly, DoubleDutch hasn’t spent any of the $2 million from the Series A funding raised in April, and CEO Lawrence Coburn isn’t happy about that. “We should be spending more money,” he laments. “Two of our last three quarters have been profitable, and we like to call it ‘accidentally profitable.’ I’m not super proud of that. I feel like we should be spending faster.” With this increased cash cushion, that situation will soon change, he says.
The company, which now offers a trio of apps for enterprise CRM, events, and customer service, is planning not only to invest in product, but also on international expansion, hiring, and, more specifically, growing its sales team. Now 24 employees, up from 6 last summer, DoubleDutch will grow to 50 next year, and is opening an office in Europe in 2013. It plans to increase its 4-person sales team to 30, too.
The investment and spending is all basically a part of what Coburn describes as a “big bet on the deconstruction of software.” But what does that really mean? Essentially, it’s a mobile-first mentality based on a belief that the future of enterprise software is going to involve mobile applications that perform one function, as opposed to desktop or online software that offers a complete suite with all those functions combined.
“We get a lot of our inspiration from what’s happening on the consumer side,” says Coburn. “Obviously, we’re big fans of Path and Foursquare and Pocket, but the service we watch most closely is Facebook,” he adds. “And what we’ve been seeing from Facebook over the last six months is interesting – we’ve seen an effort by them to almost chop up their giant app with all its features and functionality into mobile-first apps. We saw it with Messenger, with [Facebook Camera] and with Instagram. We think it’s a precursor as to what’s going to happen in the enterprise.”
Coburn explains that enterprise software companies have the Facebook problem times ten. “These are systems that were built over decades. They don’t have hundreds of features,” he says, “they have thousands.”
In DoubleDutch’s case, the company is first focused on extracting pieces of CRM systems and bundling those as individual mobile apps. These include DoubleDutch’s flagship application Flock, an event management app that serves also to help develop leads; a lead management app called Hive, which syncs with Salesforce; and Pride, which is focused on customer relationships. Pride is about to be retooled with a greater emphasis on customer service. Its other functions, like product management for example, will be spun out into new applications.
Another application in the works include an iPad-based Hive companion which will focus on displaying and sharing collateral with clients. The prototype is already built, and the release is expected for early 2013. The company is also working on making it so that all DoubleDutch’s apps share data through more programmatic means.
Currently, companies can use Flock to track what their customers are interested in at their enterprise conferences – that is, what sessions are they adding to their agendas, what items are the favoriting or commenting on, etc. Those actions help the company to identify the type of customer, what they want to know, and how to market to them. However, pulling these leads from Flock involves extracting a CSV file and then uploading it into Hive through the online dashboard. “One of the uses of these proceeds is to make this ‘less hacky’,” explains Coburn. “This vision is what we sold to Floodgate – that we’re going to reinvent CRM,” he says. A key part of that is making the apps work together more seamlessly.
DoubleDutch is growing now at 60% month-over-month, and is on track to $10 million on bookings. (The company reported $5 million in revenues in April.) To date, DoubleDutch has done 190 enterprise deployments, in terms of paying customers. There are even more on the free side – Pride has 1,000 companies using it, and Hive has 600 enterprises on the free version.