Crushpath Gets $2M To Help Salespeople Seal The Deal: Charles River Ventures And More Are Backing

With all of the M&A activity going down with CRM leviathans Oracle and Salesforce, a timely launch from a new startup looking to disrupt the sales process once again. Crushpath, founded by former executives from Jive Software and Socialcast, is offering a platform for salespeople to control a deal from lead to close, with social elements added into the mix, and it has closed a $2 million round of seed funding led by Charles River Ventures to do it.

Other investors include Chamath Social + Capital Partnership, the former VP of Facebook, Marketo CEO Phil Fernandez, Jive CEO Dave Hersh and Box’s CEO Aaron Levie. Phil Libin, the CEO of Evernote, is also joining Crushpath’s board of advisors. And as part of Levie’s and Libin’s involvement, Crushpath is also announcing partnerships with the two services.

The idea behind Crushpath is to make it easier for salespeople to track their touchpoints with sales prospects, and it uses the same platform to share pitches and other correspondence with those clients — or the “play-by-play” of the deal, in the words of Sam Lawrence, co-founder and CEO of Crushpath, who founded the company after leaving his position as CMO of Jive Software, the social enterprise services company.

He is also playing strong on the social element of how sales deals get closed. ”We are offering a third space, between the sales team and a client, where they can come together,” he said. ”We had looked at the whole social business space and it was less social and more about business.”

If users sign up with Salesforce, the Crushpath platform links up with that database and automatically synchronizes actions like recording sales. Similarly, data from email, news, websites, LinkedIn and Google (and now Evernote) also gets pulled into the platform “filtering out the noise” to create a concentrated view of a client and its activities. Promotional materials that a salesperson wants to push to a client can also be stored in the app.

In the past, he says, sales teams would have needed to look in potentially dozens of different places to source this kind of information, with Salesforce better suited to recording deals rather than managing the lifecycle to get there.

While the Crushpath software is only officially launching today, its investors have been attracted by the track record the founders, who also include Matt Wilkinson, had at their previous companies. “At CRV we invest in entrepreneurs with a clear vision, who are attacking a massive market and who know how to execute. Crushpath’s founding team built next-‐gen enterprise companies such as Jive and Socialcast and they have an opportunity to do it again with Crushpath,” said George Zachary, a partner at Charles River Ventures, in a statement.

Crushpath is also offering a disruptive price: $29 for a basic license and $49 for one that can link in with other platforms like Salesforce (Salesforce not included). This is just a fraction of the price of competing software packages that are designed to help salespeople make sales.