CloseFactor Raises $4.5 Million Led By Sequoia Capital to Accelerate AI/ ML-enabled Go-to-market Strategy and Execution

Companies like LaunchDarkly and Chronosphere have already realized gains in pipeline and deal momentum via CloseFactor

CloseFactor announced a $4.5M seed funding round led by Sequoia Capital to reimagine the business to business sales process, bringing the benefits of greater automation and precision targeting to sales teams.

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“The number of cloud native engineering organizations is growing by the day. Lagging information such as firmographics or funding rounds is not enough to effectively size and segment this market let alone deploy our salesforce effectively on it”

CloseFactor, already in use at several companies such as Zuora, LaunchDarkly, and Chronosphere, uses machine learning to deliver customized sales insights about target accounts and buyer personas.

Alignment between go-to-market strategy and feet-on-the-ground execution has always been hindered by the lack of visibility into a dynamic total addressable market (TAM) that also incorporates the details behind every account’s initiatives and buyer personas, which is actionable by sales and marketing teams. This misalignment often results in sales people chasing the wrong deals while marketing spend is directed at entirely different audiences. As this survey on the State of Sales highlights, over 50% of sales people are missing the insights on customers most likely to buy, that will actually help them close deals more reliably and faster.

CloseFactor’s technology unites data, insights and workflow into a platform that connects Go-to-Market decision making from Chief Revenue Officers and Chief Marketing Officers all the way to individual account executives or business development representatives engaging and connecting with their customers. CloseFactor customers achieve impressive results with the platform: up to 2-4X increase in high quality pipeline and the resulting closed deals, and over $1M in sales productivity savings.

“A majority of B2B go-to-market teams lack forward looking visibility into the true potential of their markets. They often use conventional methods like employee size and revenue growth to prioritize accounts and approximate whitespace opportunities, ” says Leena Joshi, co-founder & CEO of CloseFactor. “With CloseFactor, every one of these companies can now have the precision and targeting of a sophisticated data science team in their arsenal.”

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“The sales stack at every B2B tech company has a dozen tools, yet account executives and SDRs are still struggling to prioritize their time and understand which accounts are their best prospects,” said Bogomil Balkansky, partner at Sequoia Capital. “Sales people are handed zip code territories or target account lists, and their only research tools are Google and the companies’ websites. CloseFactor is the research assistant that every salesperson wants in its ability to uncover insights about target accounts and buyer personas, and produce prioritized account lists that double sales people’s productivity. We are excited to be a part of the CloseFactor team’s journey.”

CloseFactor Customer Commentary:

LaunchDarkly, the pioneer in scalable feature management has achieved tremendous success and accelerated growth in the software infrastructure space. LaunchDarkly’s sales and marketing teams align on CloseFactor – using it at the highest level to make decisions about go-to-market strategy, score accounts and connect it all the way to account executives prospecting into every account with complete context.

“Since partnering with CloseFactor, they have been a secret weapon in our sales and marketing teams’ arsenal, helping with key decisions like audience spend allocation and growth acceleration strategy,” said Keith Messick, Chief Marketing Officer at LaunchDarkly. “I’m thrilled to see their market validation through this latest fundraising round, even if it means that our secret sales and marketing advantage is a little less covert.”

As one of the fastest growing companies in its space, Chronosphere achieved tremendous success because of the high pace of product innovation and tremendous value delivered to cloud-native organizations. To keep advancing at this rapid pace, the Chronosphere team wanted the most efficient possible approach to growing their go-to-market footprint.

“The number of cloud native engineering organizations is growing by the day. Lagging information such as firmographics or funding rounds is not enough to effectively size and segment this market let alone deploy our salesforce effectively on it,” says Ali Jones, Head of Revenue Operations at Chronosphere. “The CloseFactor platform provided Chronosphere with a custom account prioritization view based on forward looking buying indicators, 100% specific to Chronosphere’s value prop, across tens of thousands of accounts. Since deployment earlier this year, we have already seen higher quality and quantity of pipeline from our target accounts powered by CloseFactor. Additionally, CloseFactor has given us a unique edge in setting all our reps up for success via fair and equitable territories which is an elusive goal for many sales organizations and also critical in this time of competitive sales talent market.”

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