Crayon Raises $6 Million Series A Led by Bedrock Capital to Deliver Software-Driven Competitive Insights

By STS News Desk On Feb 6, 2019

61% of Businesses Say Competitive Intelligence Drives Revenue Growth, New Benchmark Study Finds

Crayon, the market and competitive intelligence company that enables businesses to track, analyze, and act based on market movements, has raised $6 million in venture capital funding led by Bedrock Capital. Crayon will use the new funds to double the team and support growth across engineering, sales, services, and marketing. In 2018, the company grew its revenue 300%, doubled the team, and brought on hundreds of the most sophisticated companies as customers, including many in the Fortune 500.

“Companies today effectively use technology to understand and act on internal data. But that is only half of the picture,” said Eric Stromberg, co-founder and partner at Bedrock Capital, who led the round. “Crayon solves the other part of the equation by giving companies software-driven insight into everything happening beyond their four walls. We’re excited to partner with the Crayon team as they build a category-defining company and bring real-time market intelligence to every organization.”

Crayon customers include Fortune 50 companies and mid-sized businesses across industries, including Intuit, Monster.com, and Zendesk. Global enterprises and high growth startups alike use the Crayon solution to enable sales teams to win more deals, improve marketing performance to break through crowded markets, and inform product strategy to build the best solutions. Crayon customers have seen sales win rate increases of more than 50% and time savings of at least 20%, among other benefits.

Also released today, Crayon’s second annual State of Competitive Intelligence Report reveals best practices in the field of market and competitive intelligence (CI) from more than 1,000 CI professionals. The study found that 87% businesses say their market has become more competitive, and 80% have already started investing in CI as a function.

“Businesses today should be as data-driven about what’s happening outside their business as they are about what’s happening internally with their sales, marketing, and product metrics in CRMs and BI tools,” said Jonah Lopin, Crayon CEO and co-founder. “We’re building the solution to make that possible. Crayon is already best-in-class at capturing complete market and competitive intelligence, and we’re building more tools every day to enable businesses to extract insight, drive action, and deliver meaningful ROI.” In the last four months, Crayon has released dynamic Battlecards, Salesforce integration, and integration with sales enablement platforms, among other improvements.

This funding round includes participation from existing investors, including Baseline Ventures, Converge, Box Group, Oyster Funds and both new and existing angel investors. Steve Anderson of Baseline Ventures and Eric Paley of Founder Collective led previous fundraising rounds.