Market and competitive intelligence startup Crayon announced Tuesday it closed on a $22 million Series B round led by Baird Capital, with participation from Baseline Ventures, Bedrock Capital, and C&B Capital. Gaingels, one of the largest and most diverse angel networks, has also come aboard as an investor as part of Crayon’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
Competitive intelligence is a multi-billion-dollar industry, and has been around for decades. But for most of that time, it’s really been human-driven, which has caused it to “fall short” in a lot of ways, says Crayon’s co-founder and CEO Jonah Lopin. For one, relying on humans to do all the data collecting and analysis that goes into competitive intelligence is expensive. Plus, by the time their work is done, their information is weeks or even months old. After all, old information isn’t very helpful when you’re trying to stay ahead of the competition.
Crayon is working to make the process more “programmatic, cheap and timely,” Lopin says. The platform collects information both inside and outside the company, generating insights that help businesses make decisions more confidently. The company offers a whole suite of tools that can be integrated into a business’ CRM, chat, sales and knowledge sharing platforms to ensure everyone in the company acts on the same information.
“We help businesses understand what’s happening outside the four walls of the company, then translate that into better execution and better decision making across their sales, marketing, product and executive teams — across the entire company,” Lopin told Built In. “We’re helping companies build a competitive intelligence backbone, and helping them figure out how to build a complete program across their whole company.”
Today, Crayon has more than 500 customers, including major names like Dropbox, Spotify, Gong and Salesforce. It has also positioned itself as a leader in the booming industry of competitive intelligence, which is what attracted these major VC firms.
“Companies are drowning in data today and dedicating more resources — both technology dollars and human capital — to better understand and make use of it,” Benedict Rocchio, a partner at Baird Capital who will be joining Crayon’s board of directors, said in a statement. “As a longtime active investor in the marketing technology space, Baird Capital saw the clear need for how Crayon’s approach streamlines the vast amounts of data with a single source of truth for all competitive insights.”
Going forward, Crayon says it will use this fresh funding to accelerate product development and grow its team. The company has about 100 employees — the majority of which are based in Boston — and plans to double its headcount over the next year.
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