Pipedrive, a CRM platform designed to help SMBs sell more, has closed $17 million in Series B funding.
The round was led by Atomico, the global VC firm founded by Skype’s Niklas Zennström, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, and Rembrandt Venture Partners. The Estonia/U.S.-based startup last raised $9 million in Series A funding back in May 2015.
Pipedrive says will use the new capital to develop its product and tech, grow its partner ecosystem, and for global marketing. The round brings Pipedrive’s total VC funding to just over $30.4 million.
Founded in 2010, Pipedrive says it now has more than 30,000 paying small business customers from more than 140 countries, making it a genuine contender against more established players in the CRM space for small to medium sized businesses.
Its calling card has always been that it is sales software designed to serve first and foremost the needs of sales people not their managers — built by sales people, for sales people, if you like — but has since matured into a more comprehensive CRM platform play.
This has seen Pipedrive integrate with 50-plus online software solutions, adding more each month. These include various business tools such as Google Apps, Trello, Zapier, Mailchimp, Yesware, and Pandadoc.
Once you incentivise sales people at SMBs to add data to the company’s CRM by making it easier and proving that more sales can be closed by doing so, it makes sense to enable that data to work across other parts of the company’s SaaS stack.
In a call with Atomico’s newly promoted Partner, Teddie Wardi, who also joins Pipedrive’s board, he told me that the VC firm was in part attracted to Pipedrive because it is a truly international SaaS company.
This has seen it target North America early, including a 30-person office in New York, but not at the detriment of other territories, partly achieved through a self-service model that doesn’t care where an in-bound enquiry comes from but also via localisation and having a global sales and product culture from the get-go. I’m told Brazil, for example, is one of Pipedrive’s biggest markets.
And, of course, the startup has its development and product base in Estonia. It employs 200 people in offices in Tallinn and Tartu. In fact, Wardi believes Pipedrive could be Estonia’s next big success story. To that end, regardless of its increasing U.S. presence and whatever it says here in the press release, I’m still chalking up Pipedrive as a European company.
“[The] partnership with Atomico is a huge victory for us as they are one of the few VC firms whose partners have hands-on experience building multi-billion, global and fast growing technology companies,” said Timo Rein, CEO and cofounder of Pipedrive, in a statement. “Sales is hard no matter where you do business. This new partnership will enable us to fulfil our mission of helping salespeople around the world sell better whether they live in NYC or a small town in Brazil.”