The three founders who have built one of the bigger risk management startups have expanded their new company to take on another challenge in the work world.
The SmartSuite platform allows teams to collaborate on projects, build automation around that work, and search and access work across a larger library of data across different numbers of apps.
The company has quietly gained 50,000 users from 5,000 companies, including Apple Bank, Credit One Bank, UCLA, Georgetown University, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Sunday Riley, Lyneer Stuffing Solutions and DataWatch, resulting in a 300% growth last year. He says he was seen. UC Berkeley. Now, behind the scenes of its growth, SmartSuite has announced $38 million in funding to expand.
SmartSuite is releasing its $38 million figure for the first time today, but its capital has been invested in several tranches.
More recently, the startup has raised a $13 million Series A round led by Canapi Ventures, featuring Sorenson Capital and High Alpha. Before that, he bootstrapped the company with his own money along with his own money along with his husband and wife duo John, Tara Derbyshire and Peter Novozel, who founders of Smart Suites, investing $11 million in 2022, followed by 14 million. I invested dollars.
The previous rodeo in Derbyshire was Archer Technologies, a risk management platform that sold to EMC (now Dell) for $200 million in 2010. It reportedly is worth more than $2 billion. Novosel, the third co-founder and CTO of SmartSuite, joined Archer in the middle of his life as a startup and remained at EMC/Dell for several years after the acquisition.
Derbyshire actually sold Archer and retired early after moving from Overland Park, Kansas (where Archer was founded) to Newport Beach, California, but found that he still had the itching of a startup that would scratch I did. There they linked Novocel and returned to the world of work to find SmartSuite.
Beyond the money to effectively bootstrap a new business, Archer’s sales helped the trio in two important ways. They took up a strong list of company contacts and had ideas for the products that those companies needed.
As SmartSuite CEO Jon Darbyshire explains, in the process of building and operating Archer’s risk platform, he and his team are looking at the shortcomings of software and cloud services and how they worked together. I gained insights.
Tools for managing how people work across apps have been around for some time, but Darbyshire is taking a fragmented approach to end users using them. I discovered that there are many.
“Customers have a variety of tools for sales, marketing, HR and operations (for example) and they are using products like Zapier to build integrations between these tools. “I did,” he said. “It was a constant headache and we had to put all our business data in one core location.”
SmartSuite summarises three software usage cases, he said.
“Think traditional project management tools like Mondays and asanas. These are very suitable for projects and tasks, but not all business is tasks,” he said.
Other tools like Slack are intended to summarise people’s discussions about the work they do and the work they do, but such tools leave many desirable. Chat-driven apps can be very loud and hard to follow conversation threads.
“The second piece is a tool like ServiceNow, more process management. And the third category is document management. Think concepts, Google Docs, or Microsoft Loop. So, these three core features put together into one platform.
SmartSuite aims to be a platform where individuals or teams can “manage any process.”
To make it easier to onboard customers, SmartSuite has built 200 different templates for typical workflows. The startup says it supports integration with around 5,000 applications that bring many competitive alternatives, including Slack, Microsoft, Google, Hubspot, Salesforce, Jira, Make, Zapier, and more. The goal here is to allow more comprehensive application access while enabling employees to use existing solutions if they choose.
The fact that SmartSuite can be used with the very tools that are aiming to replace it may be one argument for adopting it.
The answer may be that your IT or compliance team chooses to be on the road.
Walker Porehand, president and general partner of Canapi Ventures, said, “We highlighted the platform’s ability to remove complexity from inherently complex processes such as governance, risk, compliance and compliance (GRC). SmartSuite already has customers Many banks are counting among them. As Canapi is a Fintech specialist with over 70 banks supporting it through the Canapi Alliance, the financial services business is about how all software works together. It is fair to be one of the companies that are trying to simplify the observability of.
Darbyshire said that customers use SmartSuite in a variety of ways. Some run and work on all the software, while others manage specific workloads, such as cybersecurity, risk and compliance, recruitment and staffing. SmartSuite uses AWS as its cloud provider and “as a closed loop system” to run on the platform for all your documentation and other tasks.
A portion of the new funds will be used for recruitment. Interestingly, all the traction of previous startups has been achieved without a single marketing rental. “All growth was viral, primarily through YouTube video content created by our partners,” he said, adding that there are around 600 videos covering different integrations and uses. Startups are currently hiring more formal marketing teams.