Estonian startup Pipedrive raises USD9 million in funding

The Tallinn-based software company, Pipedrive, which provides wise and practical help to salesmen, announced on 14 May it had raised an additional USD9 million in funding to help accelerate its growth.

“This investment will help us hire more talented people to join our current family of employees. With their help, we will build more technology, market more broadly and deliver greater service to our more than 10,000 customers and many more small businesses and their salespeople around the world,” Pipedrive‘s CEO Steve Oriola said in a statement.

The funding round was led by American venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners. “Pipedrive’s growing base of more than 10,000 paying small business customers shows that the company’s simple, intuitive approach to helping them sell better by visualising the sales pipeline works. We invested in Pipedrive because we believe that it has the potential to help more small businesses around the world close more business,” Alex Ferrara, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, said.

Berlin-based Paua Ventures and existing investors, including Rembrandt Venture Partners and AngelPad, also participated in the funding round. Previously, the Silicon Valley technology guru, Vivek Ranadive, and the former star basketball player, Shaquille O’Neal, also invested in the company. Pipedrive has raised USD13.4 million to date.

Pipedrive was founded in 2010 and it has managed to stand out in the vast ocean of customer relations management (CRM) tools. The company has over 10,000 paying customers (and 50,000 users) in over a hundred countries and makes millions of euros in sales revenue.

Whereas most customer management software is meant for supervisors and focuses on providing them with an objective overview of sales activity and the working sales people only tick boxes in each stage, Pipedrive has kind of turned it upside down: it starts from the needs of the sales person who is working on developing customer relations. It aims to provide feedback on the effectiveness of sales activity in the “sales-pipe”.

This logic won over the first users, who started to use the product’s beta-version in autumn 2010. The following spring the company was established enough to start charging its customers. Pipedrive can be used to sell anything, from advertising and trucks to journalism. A third of the company’s customers come from Europe, a third from the US and a third from the rest of the world.

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Cover: Pipedrive’s HQ in Tallinn (photo by Eero Vabamägi).