Belgium startup Teamleader, which began life while co-founders Jeroen De Wit, Willem Delbare and Mathias De Loore were studying together at university, has raised €10 million in Series B funding. The round is led by previous backer Fortino Capital.
Teamleader’s cloud platform aims to help SMEs go digital, offering an all-in-one solution for things like CRM, invoicing, project management and customer offers.
“Our original company was a web building company founded in 2008 when we were still in high school,” says Teamleader co-founder and CEO Jeroen De Wit.
“We noticed that our SME customers always ran into the same problems: managing their customer base (CRM), creating and sending offers to leads and the invoicing process. Since these were the exact problems that we were facing, and since we couldn’t find a solution on the market that we liked, we developed a tool ourselves”.
By the time its founders graduated in July 2012 they had an MVP ready. “We convinced a few of our web agency customers to try it out, and based on their feedback we kept improving the product,” adds De Wit.
Since then the startup has come a long way. As well as two funding rounds prior to today’s Series B, bringing total funding to €13.5 million, Teamleader opened offices in the Netherlands, Germany and Spain, in addition to Belgium, something that its CEO says reflects a “multi-local” approach.
“We try to get as close to our customers as possible in every country,” he says. “We always hire local people, provide support in local language and integrate with local accounting software or other integrations”. France and Italy will soon follow.
Meanwhile, De Wit tells me the startup has three main competitors. The first is DIY solutions and spreadsheets like Excel. The second is standalone tools with limited integration, meaning data is siloed and data entry often has to repeated. The third are the other existing all-in-one corporate tools, which he says are often too expensive for SMEs.