SpringCM: With this $18M, we ‘want to be in every fight’ with Dropbox & Box

SpringCM CEO Greg Buchholz really, really wants you to know his company’s name.

The “content cloud services” company based in Chicago today announced $18 million in new financing that it will use primary to rev up its sales and marketing engine.

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“Rightly or wrongly, one of the reasons we are not well known is we were not targeting the hundreds of millions of free users, which is where Dropbox has succeeded,” SpringCM‘s Buchholz told VentureBeat Wednesday afternoon.

While pulling in users with a free offering is a great way to build brand awareness, it’s a very expensive proposition — one SpringCM had no desire to emulate.

“I think all three of us are targeting a different part of the content world,” Buchholz said. “I still think of Dropbox as more of a consumer company.”

The SpringCM service is about much more than sync and storage, said Buchholz, who left the venture capital world to found the company in 2005. From day one, it’s catered to enterprise customers, with a focus on security and document management features. SpringCM has a document workflow “engine,” version control tools, document check-in, and so on. It also offers the ability to populate metadata around any piece of content, which can help people throughout an enterprise find content through search.

Folks using SpringCM can track every piece of action and activity around a piece of content, chief marketing officer Ben Kiker told VentureBeat. That’s essential for SpringCM’s government and health care customers, such as the U.S. Department of Energy and Athena Health. SpringCM also has some tech companies using its service, including Silicon Valley giants Google and Facebook.

SpringCM competes with cloud collaboration companies like Huddle as well as more traditional cloud storage companies.

About half of SpringCM’s 400 enterprise customers are also Salesforce customers, said Buchholz. Most commonly, these shared customers want to manage documents and forms in a more efficient fashion for sales and marketing teams using Salesforce.

Salesforce “is not a terrific place for standardizing information on how you’re going to store and manage information around those opportunities or accounts,” said Buchholz, noting that SpringCM can push those materials into the Salesforce system at the appropriate juncture.

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Buchholz declined to disclose company-wide revenue, but said that multiple customers pay SpringCM north of $500,000 a year. Additionally, the firm “consistently” has a greater than 90 percent renewal rate, and last quarter it was 95 percent, he said.

This new $18 million financing featured investments from Goff Capital and Square 1 Financial in addition to participation from existing investors. SpringCM’s total funding now stands at $61 million.

Today, the company has roughly 100 full-time employees. By the end of the year, it’s looking to hire another 50 or so. Around 15 will join the firm’s Silicon Valley office, where marketing chief Ben Kiker resides.

Buchholz anticipates a 100 percent growth rate year-over-year. To accomplish that, he’s focusing heavily on sales and marketing for the first time in the company’s nine-year history.

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“I want to be in every fight. I want to be in every game. I want to win every deal — and it’s just difficult,” he said.

“It’s difficult from a market awareness standpoint to get everyone to take a look at us. But that’s what I want the most: to have a fighting chance in every deal that’s out there.”