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Venture Capital News: Clari Launches with $6M in Funding

2014-04-05
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA, Mobile-first sales productivity platform, today announced it has emerged from stealth and raised $6 million.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA, Clari, the premier mobile-first sales productivity platform, today announced it has emerged from stealth and released its product to improve the effectiveness of sales teams. Clari combines mobile, intuitive design and data science to help sales teams close deals faster, reduce manual reporting and gain unprecedented insight into deal progress. The company also announced it has partnered with Sequoia and raised $6 million. Clari will be exhibiting and presenting at DEMO Enterprise April 3, 2014 in San Francisco.

'Mobile and data science will transform every enterprise system, and CRM will lead the way because field sales teams are inherently mobile,' said Andy Byrne, CEO of Clari. 'Today's CRM systems have grown so large, they've become more of a database infrastructure -- a critical foundation for reporting and forecasting, but not designed to improve sales team productivity. Clari's mobile-first approach integrates CRM with all the systems sales teams need to help them sell more and close deals faster.'

Dozens of Fortune 500 organizations are already using Clari and their sales reps have reduced their time spent on administration by up to 80 percent, giving them 20 to 25 percent of their time back to spend with clients. Teams are also closing deals one to two weeks faster and making an immediate impact on top line revenue.

'Just like Box or Evernote, the simplicity of the Clari service allows our sales teams to see value nearly immediately,' said Jeff McKittrick, Director of Sales Enablement for Cisco. 'The Clari team's keen understanding of the nuances of enterprise sales has resulted in a product that puts critical sales processes and relevant information at the fingertips of sales reps, driving productivity and insights like we've never seen before.'

As cloud-based software becomes ubiquitous in the enterprise, BYOD and mobility become drivers of productivity and growth. A recent Salesforce study found that 76 percent of businesses see improved responsiveness and decision-making with mobile apps. However, enterprise mobility to date has not improved sales productivity -- capturing CRM data from the field continues to be cumbersome and time-consuming, taking away valuable face time with clients.

'Clari addresses the two biggest challenges faced by every sales team: selling more product, and forecasting more accurately,' said Aaref Hilaly, Sequoia partner and Clari board member. 'By analyzing the richer data that can be captured on mobile devices, Clari enables sales people to be more productive and provides managers with new insight into the sales process.'

Clari's sales productivity platform was designed to fuel the entire sales cycle -- from meeting prep and follow-up to updating CRM and forecasting revenue.

How Clari Works
With Clari, sales reps have a mobile, easy-to-use window into all their sources with content organized around the two things that matter most: their deals and their relationships. At the same time, managers and sales operations teams have their first real-time view into deal progress, allowing them to coach reps in time to exceed quarterly goals, assign sales support resources more effectively, and apply science and data to optimize sales best practices.

Specific elements of the Clari sales productivity platform include:

Cloud service - an always-on discovery service that unifies and reorganizes all information from internal and external selling sources: CRM, Sharepoint, Exchange, Box, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Gmail, news, and Twitter
Deal assistant - a rich, mobile app experience on iOS and Android to improve rep preparedness, productivity, and communication, while dramatically reducing CRM data-entry
CRM accelerators - data-science and workflow-driven alerts and guidance to help sales reps prioritize and be more effective
Deal progression dashboard - delivers to managers and sales operations new levels of real-time visibility into how deals are progressing

Clari's senior management team has deep expertise from some of the world's largest and most innovative enterprise, consumer, and mobile companies, including IBM, Symantec, Facebook and Apple. The company is using the funding from Sequoia primarily for expansion and product development to meet growing market demand.

Availability
Clari is currently in use with more than 50 industry-leading companies such as VMware, Juniper, Cisco, Box, and Nimble Storage. For more information and to begin a free trial, visit www.clari.com.

Resources

DEMO Enterprise 2014: Pavilion Station #D12
Hear CEO Andy Byrne speak at CITE Conference and Expo panel 'Mobile-First Enterprise Apps,' Tuesday April 29 at 11:00 a.m.

About Clari
Clari is the premier mobile-first sales productivity platform, combining mobile, design, and data science to help field sales teams drive more business, reduce manual reporting, and offer new levels of visibility into deal progress. Sales teams from VMware, Cisco, Box and Nimble Storage use Clari to know more, sell more and update less. Backed by Sequoia Capital, Clari is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif. To get additional information, visit us at Clari.com and follow us @clarihq.

About Sequoia Capital
Sequoia Capital helps founders turn imaginative ideas into enduring companies. As the 'Entrepreneurs Behind the Entrepreneurs,' the Sequoia team has worked closely with legendary founders such as Steve Jobs of Apple, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner of Cisco, David Filo and Jerry Yang of Yahoo!, Max Levchin, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel of PayPal, Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley of YouTube, and Reid Hoffman and Jeff Weiner of LinkedIn. Sequoia is now helping the next generation of innovators build the lasting companies of tomorrow.

About DEMO
Produced by the IDG Enterprise events group, the worldwide DEMO conferences focus on emerging technologies and new products innovations, which are hand selected from across the spectrum of the technology marketplace. The DEMO conferences have earned their reputation for consistently identifying cutting-edge technologies and helping entrepreneurs secure venture funding and establish critical business. For more information on the DEMO conferences, visit http://www.demo.com/.
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