Cambridge, MA-based Yesware has landed $4 million in Series A funding to further develop its trove of communication tools for sales people.
The new cash infusion was led by new investor IDG Ventures and included Yesware seed backers Google Ventures, Foundry Group, and Golden Venture Partners, says CEO Matthew Bellows. The new lead investor is “really good for us because they were early on in the Salesforce investment, and have tremendous insight into enterprise CTO- and CIO-kind of needs and purchases, with all their magazines and trade shows,” he says.
Yesware got its start in late 2010 with a mission of revamping e-mail so that it could better help sales people at software companies and the like land deals, while giving managers insight into top performers. Last year it released its service of e-mail plug-ins and pre-set templates that help salespeople reach out to prospects at different stages of the selling process. The plug-ins also provide analytics to sales managers on who is landing deals and who isn’t—without requiring data entry in separate customer relationship management (CRM) software—to better train those who are lagging.
Yesware, which is moving soon to an office near Boston’s South Station, has also nabbed about 40,000 customers along the way, with the likes of local inbound marketing startup HubSpot and enterprise social network Yammer (reportedly acquired by Microsoft, not sure how that will affect Yesware’s work with them). The company is bringing on its ninth employee early next month.
With the new funding, Yesware will focus on “platform expansion,” meaning it will develop its Gmail plug-in for Outlook e-mail and the mobile phone. On the phone front, the Yesware e-mail tool could generate a list of prospects who haven’t yet responded, who salespeople could then call directly, Bellows says. These developments are in the very early stages, he says. Yesware is also working on the ability to enter data in CRM systems directly from e-mail.
“The grand scheme for Yesware is to really be everywhere a salesperson needs to be,” Bellows says.
