DataBased (Lehi), a CRM-compatible sales performance management platform raised a $3 Million seed round at the end of November 2021. Investors in this round include Sumeet Gajri, Managing Partner at Original Capital, a VC firm in San Francisco; John D’Agostino, a Utah-based angel investor and former Qualtrics global sales EVP; Charly Kevers, CFO at Carta (San Francisco); and friends and family of the Databased founders. DataBased is currently valued at $40 Million. 

“We chose our investors by starting with the people that really believed in us back in 2018 when we started the company,” explains Co-Founder of DataBased and Software Engineer, Dustin Watkins. “There were a number of people who wanted to invest in us back then, but we were committed to bootstrapping at the time. When we finally decided to do a seed round of funding we gave them the first opportunity to invest… After that, we wanted people to invest who felt the problem or are currently feeling the problem we wanted to solve so they could give us good feedback. We even had a couple of early adopter customers that ended up investing as well.” 

Funding will go towards doubling DataBased’s engineering team, driving product growth and user experience, and expanding the company’s go-to-market organization. 

“DataBased provides CFOs visibility and actionability into what levers to pull in order to yield increased ROI for Go-to-Market spend,” says investor Charly Kevers.

DataBased was founded by two brothers, Dustin and Dan Watkins. Dan Watkins worked for Qualtrics since it was run out of Ryan Smith’s garage 14 plus years ago. He exited the company as the Global VP of Sales after the 2018 $8 billion SAP acquisition of Qualtrics. 

During his time at Qualtrics, Dan Watkins worked with various sales leaders, including Nate Richard, and identified a consistent problem during their hyper-growth phase: how to steadily increase productivity and the success of the sales teams while delivering predictable revenue growth.

“If your sales team is spread out globally, how do you go about understanding the day-to-day?” asks Nate Richard, now the head of GTM at DataBased. “Is what we’re doing every day keeping us on track to hit our forecast or revenue target? We looked for a technology out there that could answer that and at the time there wasn’t anything.” 

After identifying this issue, Dan Watkins founded DataBased along with his brother, Dustin, in 2018. 

“We solve a problem a lot of CFOs, CROs, and VPs of sales struggle with – knowing how to best scale the revenue-generating teams in a predictable way,” says Dustin. “Dan is really good at this, and I knew how to build the software for him.” 

DataBased integrates with the CRM of a company (compatible with both Salesforce and HubSpot, which make up about 80 percent of the sales market) and looks at the inputs of the sales organization to understand what activities and skills lead to the highest correlation of success. 

“As teams grow, DataBased enables your leaders to visualize success in a really simplified way so they can go and take action without having to look through all the data or do their own analysis,” says Richard. “A lot of companies are already tracking things in their CRM, they just don’t have a technology or solution that will go and do that work for them, to find that path for success.” 

In 2018, the Watkins brothers found companies willing to try out their first product for free. They relied on close customer relationships for clear, productive feedback. To this day, feedback and integration is an important part of Databased. 

“On the client success side, we’ve gone through quite a bit to build a personal relationship with our customer base,” says Richard. “The mark of any great startup and what can get them through a successful Series A or Series B is if they have a loyal customer base that feels passionate enough to speak up about what they love about the product, but also things that they don’t love about the product. Dustin’s team has done a tremendous job of being customer-centric on building a product for our customers that will continue to get them to love DataBased.” 

In order to ensure DataBased focuses on the right projects, the Watkins brothers and Richard take two days off-site once a month to hold a think tank session. These sessions focus on how they can best grow the company and keep their product vision while also inserting important customer feedback. An important part of this process is informing the team afterward about their ideas and getting feedback from them as well. 

DataBased saw paying customers starting in 2020 and today about half of their customers are Utah-based. They currently have 14 employees across sales, CX, marketing, product, and engineering. In June, DataBased hired Aaron Shurtleff as a Lead UX designer. He has worked previously with Domo, WorkFront, and SimpleNexus. 

The team is currently looking for more employees in sales, engineering, data science, and customer support to join the company and part of the funding will go toward ensuring competitive benefits and promotional opportunities for those hires.

DataBased raises $3 million seed, now valued at $40 million was originally published on TechBuzz.news