Pipedrive lands $9M to help small biz keep track of sales

If you measure by the variety of tools available, it’s a great time to be a salesperson.

One of the tools, Pipedrive, offers customer and deal management for small businesses. Today, the company — founded in 2010 in Tallinn, Estonia – is announcing it has landed $9 million in investment. This brings its total raised so far to $13.4 milion.

The company, which has an office in Menlo Park, California as well as in Estonia, started when its founders couldn’t find a tool they liked to manage their sales pipeline, CEO Steve Oriola told me via email.

Pipedrive emphasizes a visual depiction of a sales pipeline, he said, in order to make it easier to manage deals and time efficiently. It also gives an overview of key activities, like sending sales materials by a deadline or following up an initial contact with a phone call.

Oriola pointed to one small business customer, 360 Services, which provides fire protection services such as cleaning exhaust hoods for restaurants. It uses Pipeline so its salespeople and manager can track thousands of calls and get an overview of sales stats, he said.

“The sales manager tells us that he can pinpoint how many phone calls, emails, [and so on] one of his reps needs to make to hit his or her quota by using historical data” from the tool, he said.

Oriola noted that competitors include Zoho CRM, Base, Capsule, Insightly, and PipelineDeals.

“And everyone in the CRM market competes with Salesforce at the high end and with spreadsheets at the low end,” he said.

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But Pipedrive, he said, “is a day-to-day [and] hour-by-hour tool for salespeople themselves and focuses on the deal details and stage-based movement, as opposed to the high level, volume ‘outcome’ focus of other software.”

The company claims it has over 10,000 paying small business customers in more than 100 countries, localized into ten different languages.

The funding from this series A round will be used to hire more staff and increase marketing efforts. The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with Paua Ventures and existing investors Rembrandt Venture Partners and AngelPad.