Clari lands $20M for its mobile 'sales weapon'

Clari aspires to know sales reps better than they know themselves — and less than three months after its official launch, that goal has netted the sales productivity startup a major funding round.

Clari has raised $20 million from several institutional investors, bringing its total financing to $26 million, the company announced today. And the startup has big plans for the money, CEO Andy Byrne told VentureBeat.

With apps for iOS and Android, Clari analyzes data from a wide variety of sources — email, calendar, social, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems — to alert sales reps with insights and suggestions. If you have a deal in progress but haven’t communicated with your client for a week, for example, Clari will remind you. Simultaneously, Clari automates menial data entry tasks across dozens of apps, helping salespeople boost their productivity.

Byrne enthusiastically calls the app a “sales weapon.”

But Clari is not only for sales reps. It also offers web-based portals for sales managers and executives, who can use the service to see how their salesforce is executing. As Clari surfaces insights to reps based on their daily actions, it also offers managers the opportunity to review sales activity and intervene based on historical data and forecasts.

“We’re moving away from management by gut to more data-driven management techniques,” said Byrne.

“We’re in the era of mobile, and the era of mobile is tracking what every single user does. Building that level of visibility for customers is very exciting, [as] they can see what they’re getting out of their investment.”

Much like cloud storage vendor Box, Clari takes a viral approach to monetization. The app is free for sales reps, who (ideally) spread it to their colleagues. As managers and executives take notice, Clari brokers deals with enterprises to provide managers access to the deal progression panel, giving the higher-ups a company-wide view of their sales activity.

“By the time we’ve engaged with them, we’ve already produced a level of value that is beyond our price point,” which is $50 to $60 per user monthly, said Byrne.

Clari has more than 50 enterprise customers, including Cisco, Juniper, Box, and Nutanix. It competes with apps like Tact, which acts as a mobile hub for salespeople to manage their relationships with leads and customers. But where Tact focuses more on individuals, said Byrne, Clari is more about an entire enterprise’s workflow.

Going forward, the intersection and interactions between sales reps, managers, and executives will be a major focus, hinted Byrne. The company will also continue to integrate more cloud-based and on-premises software with Clari — a large engineering effort fueled by Clari’s new $20 million.

“We’re ushering in this new era of the death of data entry and the rise of data science, which is what investors are really excited about,” said Byrne.

Bain Capital Ventures led Clari’s $20 million financing, which also featured participation from Northgate Capital. Sequoia Capital led an earlier $6 million round in Clari.