Trello launches an enterprise tier with single sign-on and better support

Task management startup Trello is announcing today the launch of Trello Enterprise, a version of its app designed to meet the needs of big companies with many employees. Features of the Trello Enterprise include two-factor authentication, encryption of file data at rest, phone support at any hour of the day, and a dedicated account manager.

Around 20-40 companies have been using Trello Enterprise in beta for the past two months, Trello cofounder and chief executive Michael Pryor told VentureBeat in an interview. The new tier of service, which sits alongside Trello Gold and Trello Business Class, will cost $250 per user per year, Pryor said.

Trello recently brought on a vice president of sales and a pair of expert salespeople. They figured out which features to include in Trello Enterprise after asking people in companies who were using the app for critical processes what they would be willing to pay for. But this only happened after years of product development.

“Our philosophy was essentially to make something really awesome that [people] would love, that they would love to use — and then, getting buy-in from the purchasing department is going to be a hell of a lot easier than focusing on it out front,” Pryor said.

Web apps like Box and Dropbox have used this bottom-up approach for years in their quest to accumulate revenue from enterprises. Now it’s up to Trello to prove that its tool can meet the needs of both individual users and companies with thousands of workers.

The business of tracking everyone’s tasks has been getting hotter and hotter in the past few years. Last month Microsoft announced that it had acquired 6Wunderkinder, the company behind task-management app Wunderlist. And task management startup Wrike announced a $15 million funding round in June.

New York-based Trello now has more than 8 million users. Around 100,000 users come aboard every week, a spokeswoman told VentureBeat in an email.

Companies using Trello Enterprise include Condé Nast, EA, Expedia, and the University of California, Davis, Trello vice president of marketing Stella Garber wrote in a blog post on the news today.

Trello got its start in 2011, as part of Fog Creek Software. It spun out of Fog Creek to become a standalone startup and took on a $10.3 million funding round last year. Around 50 people work for Trello now, Pryor said.

Support for Active Directory is “in the feature hopper,” Pryor added. Mobile offline support is in the works, too.

Now the team behind Trello is thinking about how to “surface information to the right people at the right department when there’s a big organization and they have lots of boards,” Pryor said, regarding the company’s future plans.