Small business sales force automation platform Pipedrive enters new round
Today, Pipedrive announced a major milestone in the history of the company by raising a $9M Series A round from Bessemer Venture Partners and Paua Ventures, along with existing investors Rembrandt Venture Partners and Angelpad.
Based in Tallinn, Estonia, and Silicon Valley, Pipedrive develops and operates a Software-as-a-Service application allowing users to manage a pipeline of deals very intuitively, effectively, and efficiently. Pipedrive mainly targets 3–10 people teams, but has also been successful in attracting “solopreneurs” as well as teams within Fortune 500 companies with a low cost product. They have significant traction and are growing fast.
We’re proud to be part of the round and would like to share some reasons why we think low-cost sales automation is a great space to operate in.
1) First of all, any one that we know who has ever used Pipedrive is happy with it. Many users cite ease of use, a great user interface, integration with other apps and platforms such as Google Apps and Mailchimp, fantastically intuitive to use mobile frontend (iPhone and Android app) as well as low pricing as their main reasons for using and sticking to Pipedrive.
2) Pipedrive addresses a very large market globally: Small businesses need to manage their sales pipeline, probably the most critical element to any business. This applies to small businesses, or small units within larger businesses, globally. There are ca. 20M micro-SMBs in North America and 21M micro-SMBs in Europe, approx. 90M in emerging markets and in total ca. 130M MSMBs globally (by definition of EU, World Bank, McKinsey).
3) The company has proven product market fit with an ultra-low cost product at $12 per seat per month. Currently over ten thousand paying customers from across the world entrust their everyday sales automation to Pipedrive by entering deals and projects, keeping diary, recording deal stages, tracking and reporting progress, maintaining contact information and driving those deals forward.
4) There is a use case beyond managing sales deals: any project, plan, deal, idea, applicant process that needs to be moved from an early stage to a later stage is a deal pipeline. Whether you’re a hiring manager, a real estate agent or an account manager — Pipedrive is for you. We know a few VCs that use Pipedrive for deal flow management including us — and we’re very happy too!
5) Only about 35% of Pipedrive users are in the US with the remainder spread across the world in +120 countries. This geographic diversity in its user base is a great asset as it means the product has a lot of room to grow globally. Many of their users are converting from spreadsheet use or even pen and paper. Just as many users are also converting from Salesforce, which does not meet the needs of small and lean teams.
6) The company was founded in 2010 by experienced salespeople and product centric founders Timo Rein, Urmas Purde, Ragnar Sass, Martin Tajur, and Martin Henk. They very early on placed an emphasis on hiring great engineering and product talent. By 2014 they had transitioned the 2nd level company leadership to very capable managers, mostly based in Tallinn, and built a team of now 77 people. A few weeks ago, Steven Oriola joined the company as CEO. Mr. Oriola is a top manager of high growth companies, who is known to have substantially contributed to the growth of ConstantContact as VP Product Strategy and General Manager.
We’ve known the company and its founders for years and am very happy to be an investor now and look forward to a great journey together.
