Klue, the AI-powered competitive enablement platform, announced a $15 million Series A funding round led by Craft Ventures with participation from HWVP, existing investors OMERS Ventures, Rhino Ventures, and BDC Ventures, and several notable angel investors including Frederic Kerrest (co-founder of Okta) and Zach Coelius (top Angelist syndicate). The investment, which brings the company’s total funding to $19 million, will accelerate product and machine learning development and be used to meet the growing demand for competitive enablement.
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Klue helps companies collect and curate hard to find competitive intelligence, combining the best of what the web knows about your competition with the best of what your employees know into a single repository. This combined source of trusted and actionable insights gives sales, marketing, product, strategy and executive teams a substantial edge over the competition.
“There is a huge greenfield opportunity in competitive enablement and Klue is defining the category,” said David Sacks, co-founder and general partner at Craft Ventures. “Stagnant competitive intel decks and wikis are no longer sufficient. Businesses need to collect, curate and distribute competitive insights in real-time to stay ahead. This is why some of the world’s largest technology companies have turned to Klue.”
The investment comes on the heels of three years of 3X revenue growth and reflects strong demand for Klue’s Competitive Enablement Platform. As competition increases across every sector and disruption cycles move from years to months, enabling every department in the company to outmaneuver the competition is critical. Klue’s unique approach to competitive enablement has fueled rapid growth, securing more than a hundred marquee customers like Cisco, Tableau, SurveyMonkey, Red Hat and Shopify, cementing it’s lead as the software of choice for enterprises.
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“Every company in the world has two things in common – customers and competitors, yet there is no system of record on competitors,” said Jason Smith, CEO and co-founder of Klue. “30% of enterprise deals are lost directly to a competitor. That stings. Klue is a confidence building weapon for sales and an efficiency engine for the teams who enable them.”
Failure to differentiate from the competition is the biggest driver of losing new deals and existing customers. According to Gartner*, 52% of technology buyers find it difficult to understand vendor differentiation. Companies are using Klue to arm their revenue teams with battlecards to de-position competitors effectively – responding to the need to protect their existing customer base against competitive threats and ensure their sales teams have every advantage against hungry competitors who are aggressively chasing opportunities.
“In today’s dynamic competitive landscape, equipping sellers with the actionable competitive insights they need to compete confidently and win is a significant challenge. Cisco chose Klue to help us centralize competitive intelligence across our diverse global sales organization,” said Stefan Eller, Director, Worldwide Competitive Intelligence at Cisco. “Klue enables us to bring together market data, internal research and expertise which provides sellers and leaders alike a robust hierarchical repository of competitive data that’s easy to search and distribute. And because it’s accessible seamlessly through the sales tools they already use, it’s extremely intuitive. With over 30,000 Klue sessions in FY20, the program is off to a successful start.”
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