Four months after announcing its $18 million Series A, Oakland, California-based Vivun closed a $35 million Series B led by Menlo Ventures.
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The round also included new investors Salesforce Ventures 1 and Atlassian Ventures participating along with existing backers Accel and Unusual Ventures.
Vivun works in a field of presales — something that may not be familiar to most, but has been around for decades, said co-founder and CEO Matt Darrow. Vivun’s Hero presales platform sits in the enterprise stack between sales and product. The solution gives product teams insight into which features and new products to develop, and when, and also tells sales when new products are ready to be sold.
The company was not looking to raise the new round so soon, but after growing by 8 times in the last year and gaining new enterprise customers like Autodesk, Okta, Cloudera and Dell, the company saw opportunities to invest in different areas of the company.
“This is a long journey and you want to build the best team you can,” Darrow said. “We want a strong balance sheet to lean into the trends we see.”
Looking to invest
Matt Murphy, a partner at Menlo Ventures, had looked into participating in Vivun’s Series A last year, but the deal did not work out.
“It gnawed at me that we missed that,” Murphy said.
However, Murphy and Darrow kept their conversation going, which eventually led to an early Series B.
Vivun was an interesting investment opportunity for a variety of reasons, Murphy said. Often in the past, presales had been bolted — ineffectively — on top of other platforms such as Salesforce or other office tools, he said.
Presales also sits in the middle of a stack that includes marketing, sales, support and enablement — sectors that have produced several multibillion-dollar companies such as Oracle, Marketo, SAP, Atlassian and Salesforce, he added.
Good velocity
The 60-person company now has 45 customers — a number that tripled in the company’s last fiscal year — and has raised $56 million to date, according to Crunchbase.
Murphy said the velocity of the company is accelerating.
“There’s a kernel of something very special here,” he said.
Darrow added the company is just starting, with the opportunity to add new products and offerings and ideally be a large player in a growing space.
“It is very apparent this is its own stand-alone space,” he said.
Illustration: Li-Anne Dias.
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