

- #Scratchpad salesforce venturessawersventurebeat software#
- #Scratchpad salesforce venturessawersventurebeat series#
“The response from the investor community has been very strong and the fund was oversubscribed. We truly believe this focused approach will derisk our ventures and allow them to build much faster,” said Lafortune. We combine the competitive advantage of large incumbents - for example, access to distribution and expertise - with a strong support infrastructure and large venture capital investment. “The Diagram model is the first of its kind.

Diagram provides advice, capital and expertise with the support of Power Financial Corporation (TSX: PWF) and certain of its subsidiaries via Portag3 Ventures LP and a group of 50 angel investors, who will act as mentors and accompany founders.īased in Montreal and Toronto, Diagram is looking to attract the most talented Canadian entrepreneurs to build great global companies. Its unique strategy of making a few large, concentrated investments allows for a hands-on approach. Led by Founder & CEO François Lafortune and Chairman Paul Desmarais III, Diagram aims to be a different kind of launchpad for Canada. What the paid tiers provide is a way to bring all this data together and get a bigger-picture view of what's happening on the sales team, and it helps ensure that people are using Salesforce because the data in Scratchpad links to the Salesforce database automatically.Diagram, a new venture launchpad for Canada's most exciting startup entrepreneurs in financial, insurance and healthcare technology, announced today that it has successfully closed a $25-million fund and has deployed its first two investments. Scratchpad gives them an interface like a spreadsheet or notes application that they are typically using to hack together a workflow, but with a direct connection to Salesforce. They are essentially databases and even with a visual interface, it doesn't really match up with the way they work. Traditionally, sales teams don't like the tools that are thrust upon them. This approach of getting the end users involved early allows them to gain traction with members of the sales team before approaching management about paid versions.
#Scratchpad salesforce venturessawersventurebeat software#
The bottoms up approach is certainly something we have seen with developer tools and with software for knowledge workers, but companies often take aim at sales through the sales manager, rather than trying directly to get salespeople to use a particular tool. In fact, the company caught the attention of Craft because they were hearing about Scratchpad from their portfolio companies. He says that lead investor David Sacks, who has built some successful startups himself, really got what they were trying to do, and the deal came together fairly easily. We had plenty of runway, but we started to see a lot of bottom-up user growth, this bottom-up motion just really started to take hold," Salehi told me. "To be honest, it actually wasn't on our radar to raise again so soon after we raised what I consider a substantial seed.

Co-founder and CEO Pouyan Salehi says that he wasn't really looking to add capital, but the investors understood his vision and the money will help accelerate the product roadmap. The company has now raised a total of $16.6 million, including the $3.6 million seed round we covered in October.
#Scratchpad salesforce venturessawersventurebeat series#
Today, it announced a $13 million Series A led by Craft Ventures with participation from Accel. Scratchpad is an early-stage startup that wants to make it easier for sales people to get information into Salesforce by placing a notation layer on top of it.
