Our Investment in Pipedrive: putting salespeople in the driver’s seat
Pipedrive is something of a special investment for Atomico. During their time at Skype, many of our team experienced first-hand the outstanding talent and entrepreneurial spirit that’s fostered in Estonia, including Niklas Zennström, co-founder of both Skype and Atomico. Skype was built in Estonia, and Estonian talent was absolutely fundamental to the development and success of the business. We’re now delighted to be making Atomico’s first investment in an Estonian company — something of a homecoming for us.
The majority of small businesses still use spreadsheets and complicated manual tools to manage their sales processes. While there are numerous established CRM solutions for the enterprise market, the CRM market tailored specifically for SMEs is untapped, and huge (estimated at over $10bn).
Pipedrive provides a simple but powerful alternative through its leading sales management platform. It’s built by salespeople for salespeople, and offers Slack-like integrations with over 50 applications including Google Apps, MailChimp and Trello.
These features have made Pipedrive a hugely popular product with more than 30,000 small and medium-sized business customers in over 140 countries. With offices in Tallinn and New York, Pipedrive is already a global category leader and has had its sights set on global market dominance from its foundation in 2010.
We’re thrilled to be partnering with the Pipedrive team by leading their $17 million Series B round. Pipedrive is quickly becoming the software of choice for small businesses, and is on track to help millions of companies sell better in the future. We’re excited to help them to hone their product, and crucially to grow their international customer base.
Pipedrive is testament to the deep technical expertise and entrepreneurial spirit that can be found in Estonia. As our recent State of European Tech Report shows, great European tech firms are no longer just emerging from the likes of London, Berlin or Stockholm, a host of new tech hubs are emerging in cities like Munich, Lisbon and Tallinn.
We love working with talented European entrepreneurs like Timo Rein, Urmas Purde, Martin Tajur and Martin Henk, who have a strong product focus and far-reaching global ambitions.
Our newest Partner, Teddie Wardi will join Pipedrive’s board to offer hands-on advice and practical support, while Niklas will become a board advisor. Teddie will work with our value creation team — specifically our Partners Carlos, Shin and Kelly who are based in Latin America, Japan and China respectively. With years of experience growing multi-million dollar companies globally, we have confidence that our international team will be able to help Timo turbo-charge growth at Pipedrive.
We’ve been incredibly impressed by Timo’s vision for the business and are delighted to be working with him to help realise Pipedrive’s global aspirations.
