ProsperWorks raise $7.5 million to put CRM in your Google

ProsperWorks announced today that the company has raised $7.5 million in series A financing.

True Ventures lead the round, joined by existing investors Bloomberg Beta, Crunchfund, and other high-profile angel investors. To date, ProsperWorks has raised a total of $10 million in equity.

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Founded in 2011, ProsperWorks is a customer relationship manager (CRM) that is built in and around Google Apps. In fact, according to the company, it is the first CRM of its kind.

“ProsperWorks is the first fully integrated Google-based CRM, built from the ground up for Google, not just a CRM with a Google Apps integration,” Jon Lee, CEO at ProsperWorks, told me via email.

CRM is one of the most costly solutions in the marketing technology stack. In my State of Marketing Technology Winter 2015 report, I discovered — by looking at 2 million martech product logins and salary information from 7,227 sales and marketing staff — that the total cost of owning a CRM solution is higher than any other type of sales and marketing tech.

ProsperWorks are attempting to reduce the amount of time involved in maintaining a CRM by baking it into Google. And while CRM solutions are still favored by B2B organizations more than those that sell to consumers, the high cost of owning and running a CRM affects millions.

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“Google recently announced they have over 5 million business customers and they’re adding 1,800 more every week,” Lee said.

Others have attempted to leverage Google for CRM purposes. Notably, solutions such as Nimble and Insightly allow users to work with those CRM solutions directly from Gmail, but ProsperWorks stated that it has taken a different approach.

ProsperWorks focuses everything within Google Apps, whether it is aggregating and organizing customer data, tracking leads, prompting for follow-up, or delivering real-time insights into the sales pipeline for forecasting.  Developed with Google for Work, ProsperWorks requires no installation, no lengthy training, and automatically loads data from Google accounts.

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ProsperWorks really has gone all in on Google. It integrates with Gmail, Calendar, Hangouts, Docs, Spreadsheets, and Presentations. It also has native apps for both iOS and Android, but those apps have a small limitation: “For now the mobile apps require an Internet connection, but we have offline access on our roadmap for later this year,” Lee said.

CRM is a mature area of martech, with hundreds of players. ProsperWorks hopes to stand out from the crowd by putting the application in the “right place,” according to the company.

“We put CRM right where you talk with your customers. ProsperWorks has a Chrome Extension that sits inside your Gmail window giving you customer insights, and allowing you to add leads, tasks, and more without switching over to another window,” Lee said.

ProsperWorks is available today with a 14-day free trial. It is priced at $19 per user per month, with no limitations on number of records or data storage.

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