Scratchpad Lands $13M To Organize Sales Professionals’ Workspaces 

Scratchpad, a startup building a more intuitive workspace for sales teams, raised $13 million in a Series A round led by Craft Ventures. 

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Co-founders Pouyan Salehi and Cyrus Karbassiyoon started the company after they previously built products for the sales space. The pair most recently co-founded PersistIQ, a startup focused on outbound sales.

“It’s a space we know well, it’s a problem we know well,” Salehi said. “But a lot of folks, even us for years, overlooked the (account executive) experience. We sat down with a handful of sales teams and shadowed individual account executives.”

Part of the problem is the disjointed way account executives tend to work, with their collaboration workspace consisting of Google docs, notes, spreadsheets, calendars and other tabs all separate from their customer relationship management system. 

Scratchpad can be installed as a Google Chrome plugin or as a web application. It connects to Salesforce1 and provides an interface where sales professionals can keep all their notes, process workflows, spreadsheets and tasks. 

“Our view is that there’s an entire workspace layer that lives on top of the database, which is Salesforce, which can be really meaningful,” Salehi said.

The company has thousands of weekly active users across hundreds of companies, according to Salehi, and the new funding will be used to make the product better and faster. 

Scratchpad currently has a team of 11 people and will likely double or triple its headcount by the end of the year, Salehi said. 

When Scratchpad was first rolling out its product, retention was the focus, Salehi said, because when account executives find a sales tool that works, they tend to stick with it.

That focus evidently paid off, according to Accel partner Steve Loughlin.

“I think the thing I remembered the most about the initial call was that the retention numbers were incredible,” Loughlin said.

Along with the new funding, Craft Ventures founder David Sacks, who is also the founding COO of PayPal and co-founder of Yammer, will join Scratchpad’s board of directors.

The company last raised a $3 million seed round led by Accel. Scratchpad counts among its investors Superhuman founder Rahul Vohra, Eventjoy founder Todd Goldberg, and Sound Ventures, the VC firm co-founded by Ashton Kutcher, as well as other backers.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias