Vancouver startup Klue has raised a $15 million Series A funding round led by Silicon Valley’s Craft Ventures.
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.
Craft Ventures is led by entrepreneur and investor David Sacks and Klue is their first Canadian investment. Sacks was a member of the PayPal Mafia, a group of former PayPal employees and founders went on to found a long list of tech companies that includes Tesla, LinkedIn, Palantir, SpaceX, Square, YouTube, Yelp, and Yammer.
“There is a huge greenfield opportunity in competitive enablement and Klue is defining the category,” said 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 financing round also included 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 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.
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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.
“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.”
Klue was co-founded in 2015 by Smith and Saranthy Naicker, formerly of Vision Critical and Sophos respectively. Klue has raised a total of $19 million to date and this new investment round will be used to accelerate product and machine learning development.