This G Suite-centric CRM Service Raises $53M To Take On Salesforce

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Salesforce.com boasts of a commanding lead in the customer relationship management (CRM) market. But one small player wants to reduce that lead fast. On Tuesday, ProsperWorks announced that it has raised $53 million to boost its growth rate.

ProsperWorks will use the new funding to get more talent to penetrate further into G Suite, develop a third-party application integration platform and help mid-sized companies effectively utilize the sales tools. The company also aims to expand globally.

The funding round was led by Norwest Venture Partners, and included investors like GV (formerly Google Ventures), Storm Ventures, Industry Ventures, True Ventures and Next World Capital. ProsperWorks, which touts itself as the “#1 funded CRM company in the last decade,” concluded a $24 million Series B funding round last year, notes TechCrunch. The company has now raised $87 million to date.

ProsperWorks, founded in 2013, provides a customer relationship manager (CRM) for G Suite. The San Francisco-based startup supports sales managers and helps them to better manage their teams and workflows by using apps like Gmail, Google Contacts, and Google Calendar. ProsperWorks Cofounder and CEO Jon Lee says his company’s main objective is to make CRM more usable.

“Customer Relationship Management is the most important enterprise software category, yet most CRM technology is complicated and difficult to use, making the tool incredibly inefficient,” Lee said in a press release.

According to Forrester, CRMs currently have a failure rate of 47%. Lee says there’s no surprise with this failure rate number, as companies are wasting billions of dollars on CRMs that their employees don’t like, don’t use, or don’t know how to use. This is where ProsperWorks comes in, giving “sales teams access to a modern CRM they love to use and that actually drives revenue growth,” Lee said.

“At ProsperWorks, 86 percent of our paying customers use it every day,” he added.

ProsperWorks’ most notable technology is its ability to automatically pull data from salespeople’s Gmail accounts. For each contact, the tech creates a profile with details like address and allocates new correspondences on file with features for automating interactions. The feature also alerts a user if they forget to contact a lead.

Lee, who is also not afraid of talking about his company’s bigger rival Salesforce, aims to develop ProsperWorks as the best alternative to Salesforce.

“Salesforce might have Einstein, but if you give Einstein garbage, it will give you garbage results,” he told VentureBeat.

ProsperWorks currently serves about 25,000 customers, of which 40% are international. The company founded by experienced entrepreneurs in 2013 now has about 140 employees and tripled its revenue in 2016. With an impressive adoption rate, the San Francisco-based startup is not only the fastest growing CRM but also the fastest growing SaaS company.

“ProsperWorks is disrupting the CRM industry by challenging technology that has not been able to keep up with the user demand or adapt to market forces,” said Promod Haque, senior managing partner at Norwest.

Even though the company provides solutions for G Suite, it runs its software on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and not Google Cloud Platform, notes VentureBeat.

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