Mobile customer relationship management (CRM) solution Linko today announced a $2.6 million seed funding round and its acquisition of fellow Berlin startup Localstream. Funded by angel investors, Linko will use the funding to build its developer team, improve the product, and increase customer delivery capability.
Founded in January 2013, Linko provides a fully automated CRM service that collects sales activity data from smartphones and tablets. CEO Mikko Alasaarela told us that Linko’s USP is its ease of use and tailoring to the end user: sales employees.
“There’s a problem with CRM software — the whole market has been based on selling tools to managers, who then pass them down to employees,” Alasaarela said. “This equation means sellers of this software have been focusing on meeting the needs of managers. So employees who need to provide this data are often quite angry and frustrated with the software they are using. It’s quite universal.”
At €40 per person per month, Linko is priced midway between Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. It also faces competition from U.S.-based RelateIQ, which launched last year backed by $29 million in funding. At the moment, 2,000 companies are on the waiting list to sign up with Linko.
Coinciding with the news, Linko has announced its acquisition of location-based technology startup Localstream. On the takeover, Alasaarela said: “We saw a strong synergy between the Localstream technology platform and Linko’s core product. Automated, location-aware customer communication data will offer a huge advantage to sales managers who embrace mobile devices as sales tools”.
Localstream will cease to exist as a stand-alone product, and its technology and team will be integrated into Linko.
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This story originally appeared on VentureVillage. Copyright 2014
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