Yesware Raises Series A ($4M), Moving to New Boston Location
Wednesday Jun 20, 2012 by Brendan Lynch - Contributor, VentureFizz
Cambridge sales software startup Yesware has closed a deal of its own, raising a $4 million Series A round from IDG Ventures and others.
IDG led the funding round, which also included Google Ventures, Foundry Group, and Golden Venture Partners. It's Yesware's second round of funding after raising a $1 million seed round from Google Ventures last year. Brad Feld, Foundry Group's co-founder, will take a seat on Yesware's Board of Directors.
CEO Matthew Bellows said the funding will help Yesware, which provides email tracking and analytics services for salespeople, to move beyond Google's Gmail into other platorms, like Microsoft's Outlook, telephony services, and smartphone and tablet apps.
"Wherever a salesperson is, we want to be there," Bellows said.
The company is working on merging datastreams from email and voice, so Yesware could, for example, cycle a salesperson through a series of follow-up calls during the car ride to work, Bellows said.
"You could have 30 calls done before you're even supposed to start work," he said.
Yesware operates as a freemium service, asking aggressive users to either share the product with friends or pay $4.95 per month. Bellows said the company has 40,000 users, about 1,000 of those being paying customers. Eighty percent of users, which range from real estate, public relations, and lawyers to nonprofit dance collectives in Brooklyn and chimneysweeps, recommend the service to friends -- which is key, since Bellows calls himself the only salesman on staff, with the rest focusing on improving the product.
"That's the strength of Gmail, there are so many different kinds of companies," Bellows said.
Yesware, founded in 2011, has 8 full-time employees with another starting next month. Bellows plans to employ 15 to 18 by the end of the year, so the company is moving from Cambridge to 5,000 sq. ft. of office space on Kingston St. in Downtown Crossing next month.
"Right now we're in a two-bedroom apartment," he said. "We need some more room."
Brendan Lynch is a journalist and contributor to VentureFizz. You can follow him on Twitter (@bmolynch) by clicking here.
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