Helping Sales Teams Compete: Atrium Optimizes Data With Seed Raise

San Francisco-based Atrium has closed $13.5 million in seed funding, hoping to bring usable, proactive data to sales managers and their teams.

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The seed round includes funding from Bonfire Ventures, CRV and Bullpen Capital.

Atrium, founded in 2016, is looking to “democratize” data for the sales world, said co-founder Pete Kazanjy.

“Historically, sales managers come from an account executive background,” said Kazanjy. “They have sales skills instead of analytics skills.”

The company attempts to help sales managers with its data-driven management software that provides coaching insights and continuous monitoring, Kazanjy said. The time is right for a company like Atrium, as the world becomes more digitized and user friendly; moving away from more outdated business intelligence tools and charts, he said.

Funding

Atrium will use the new funding to grow its 30-person team, looking mainly for engineering and sales professionals, Kazanjy said. The company presently has north of 100 customers and is riding the trend in sales management to rely more on data to push growth, he said.

Brett Queener, a partner at Bonfire Ventures, said the pressure and expectations for managers to deliver is higher than it has ever been and Atrium can help companies solve that problem.

“The single biggest driver of revenue for software companies is sales productivity, and managers are less equipped than ever to hit their goals because most tools don’t focus on improving outcomes,” he said. “When I saw Atrium, I knew it was the answer.”

The market

Kazanjy said Atrium sometimes competes with older analytic stacks provided by companies like Salesforce’s1 Tableau and Google’s Looker, but believes his company’s highly usable, ready-to-use software helps differentiate the company.

While Kazanjy is familiar with M&A — he founded TalentBin, which was acquired by Monster Worldwide in 2014 — he sees a wide-open market that likely is in the tens of billions of dollars and can support a new larger, independent company.

His investors agree.

“We believe this is a huge emerging category where over time, data-driven sales management becomes the new baseline and not a hope and a prayer,” said Queener.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias.