Menlo Ventures Led the Round, with Salesforce Ventures and Atlassian Ventures Joining Forces with Vivun to Combine Sales, PreSales and Product Expertise
Talk about a hot hand. Just four months after announcing its Series A, Vivun is back with new investment: $35M in Series B funding led by Menlo Ventures, with new investors Salesforce Ventures and Atlassian Ventures participating along with existing backers Accel and Unusual Ventures. The latest investment comes as Vivun caps a year of rapid growth, bringing on a slew of enterprise customers such as Autodesk, Okta, Cloudera and Dell.
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“PreSales is a critical business function that has been completely underserved. No platform had existed prior to Vivun to support their workflows and enable their success,” said Menlo Ventures partner Matt Murphy.
“Vivun’s vision goes beyond becoming a hub for PreSales, and that’s why their approach is so transformational,” Murphy continued. “Matt Darrow and his team lived this problem in their prior roles and keyed in on the fact that once you unlock the potential of PreSales, a host of benefits follow. The ability for organizations to find, and enhance, product market fit fast by surfacing critical needs across the org is a powerful example. What Vivun is offering is truly unique in the market.”
Vivun is the first software platform dedicated to PreSales (also called sales engineering or sales consulting), the team that sits at the intersection of product and sales, coordinating technical implementations and working side-by-side with the customer. Vivun captures customer feedback at the moment PreSales receives it, using AI to cluster it, prioritize it and tie it to opportunities and revenue. Vivun gives product teams a North Star, guiding decisions about what features and new products to develop and when, with data to support each decision. Integration with Jira and Salesforce provides bidirectional communication back to the field when new products are ready to be sold.
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The impact on customer revenue can be tremendous. Three Vivun customers weighed in:
- “Using Vivun, we identified a product enhancement that will impact 67 existing customers and potentially unlock $13M in revenue.” — Toby Penn, VP PreSales, Recorded Future
- “We finally have the data to make the product changes that truly impact revenue. Do you make one change that affects a $200K deal, or deliver an enhancement that affects 20 smaller deals worth $2M? Vivun gives us these answers.” — Nick Durkin, Field CTO, Harness
- “Vivun has allowed us to prioritize product enhancements that we would otherwise have missed, because we didn’t have the data to know how meaningful they were to our larger clients. One of those features, involving access rights, has positively affected ACV of over $5 million.” — Matt Hunter, VP Products, Branch.io
“With these kinds of results, it’s fitting—and no coincidence—that the venture arms of Atlassian and Salesforce joined the round,” said Vivun CEO and cofounder Matt Darrow.
“We’ve always said, the key to product-market fit is to bridge the gap between sales and product,” Darrow said. “No one knows more about empowering revenue teams than Salesforce, and no one knows more about empowering product teams than Atlassian. Vivun provides the missing piece: an intelligent hub that brings the two together, driven by PreSales.”
Vivun’s backers from Atlassian Ventures and Salesforce Ventures agreed.
“There’s a consistent rhythm and flow when you have product-market fit,” said Matt Garratt, Managing Partner, Salesforce Ventures. “You can only maintain that when sales and product teams are in sync. Vivun had the insight to realize that PreSales was the key to achieving that flow on a predictable and consistent basis, ensuring organizations never lose their agility and responsiveness.”
This sentiment was echoed by Chris Hecht at Atlassian Ventures: “Until now, there was no good way to keep sales and product aligned in that ideal zone, because they were working in their own silos with limited visibility. That’s what makes Vivun so remarkable. It opens up the business’s view in a way no other product does.”
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