The Estonian-founded tech startup, Pipedrive, has closed a USD17 million round of funding, led by Atomico, a global venture capital firm established by one of the founders of Skype, Niklas Zennström.
Pipedrive said in a blog post that its tie-up with Atomico was a new relationship and that the company was “looking forward to tapping into their expertise in building companies that operate on a global scale”.
Other investors in the round were Bessemer Venture Partners and Rembrandt Ventures, long-time backers of Pipedrive.
“The strong backing gives us opportunities to accelerate the pace of our product development efforts, increase investment in infrastructure, add people to our team and – last but not least – grow our partner ecosystem,” Pipedrive said in a blog post.
Funding expansion
Martin Henk, a co-founder of Pipedrive and the company’s head of product management, told Estonian World that the new round of funding helped the firm execute its plans faster. “It is about making the existing product much more valuable for the end users,” he explained.
The new investment is “not about adding new products into the lineup as it is about making the existing product much more valuable for the end users,” Henk noted, adding that the funding doesn’t change Pipedrive’s geographical focus as it already is a global business with customers in more than 140 countries.
“We have been growing each of our offices in Tallinn, Tartu and New York pretty fast so far, and we’ll be continuing to hire more developers, designers, support people, marketers and other roles that help us grow,” he stated.
Atomico is an international technology investment firm headquartered in London that focuses on new consumer technologies that have the potential to transform markets.
Pipedrive is a sales management tool, designed to help small sales teams manage intricate or lengthy sales processes. The company was founded in 2010 and by now, its software is used by over 30,000 companies around the world, according to the company.
In August 2016, the US-based Inc. magazine ranked Pipedrive as the 14th fastest growing software companies in the United States.
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Cover: The support team of Pipedrive at the company’s Tallinn office meeting the former Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves in 2014.
The article says they were ranked the 14th fastest growing software company in the US. So shouldn’t the headline be “American startup” instead of “Estonian startup”?