- Crayon — a leading competitive intelligence platform for the enterprise, recently announced a $22 million Series B financing. These are the details.
Crayon — a leading competitive intelligence platform for the enterprise, recently announced a $22 million Series B financing led by Baird Capital with participation from Baseline Ventures, Bedrock Capital, C&B Capital and Oyster Funds. And Crayon also welcomed Gaingels as an investor in the Series B as part of the company’s commitment to diversity, equity & inclusion.
So far, the company has raised $38 million in total. And Crayon will use the funding to accelerate product development and expand its team. The company also announced Baird Capital’s Benedict Rocchio joined its Board of Directors.
Crayon plans to help mid-sized and large enterprises capture, analyze, and act on competitive intelligence to drive better execution & decision-making in all areas of the business. And over 500 customers including Discover, Dropbox, Gong, Intuit, SurveyMonkey, Zendesk and ZoomInfo utilize Crayon to power competitive intelligence efforts across their sales, marketing, product and executive teams.
Crayon’s platform looks within the organization and externally, thus generating insights from more than 300 million sources and enabling customers to publish, share, and leverage intelligence in a variety of formats and frequencies to match stakeholder needs. Crayon integrates with CRM, chat, sales enablement and knowledge sharing platforms to ensure teams do not miss a competitive development or opportunity.
KEY QUOTES:
“It has always been critical that businesses respond with speed and urgency to competitive shifts because competitive intelligence informs everything from product launches to pricing strategies to marketing campaigns. But there’s traditionally never been a good way to pull that off. Traditionally, gathering this data was a highly manual, time-intensive and expensive process. But today there’s a far better way to compete that’s software driven. Our platform captures competitive intelligence programmatically in real-time and empowers teams to take timely action towards increased sales and better differentiation in their market.”
— Jonah Lopin, co-founder and CEO of Crayon
“Companies are drowning in data today and dedicating more resources — both technology dollars and human capital — to better understand and make use of it. As a longtime active investor in the marketing technology space, Baird Capital saw the clear need for how Crayon’s approach streamlines the vast amounts of data with a single source of truth for all competitive insights. Jonah and the Crayon leadership team have a proven track record of building marketing tools that simplify this level of complexity at scale. They are putting marketers in the enviable position of offense, pursuing ideas they know will work and mitigating the risk of being blindsided by a competitor.”
— Benedict Rocchio, Partner with Baird Capital and new board member of Crayon
