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Sales enablement software company SAVO announced a $35 million round today led by Goldman Sachs with participation from existing investors Sterling Partners and SAP Ventures. This round puts SAVO’s funding total at about $84 million since it was founded in 1999.
Goldman Sachs, a new investor, intuitively jumped on board to lead the round due to SAVO’s impressive growth lately, CEO and President Mark O’Connell said: SAVO recently announced a 30 percent growth in client engagements, acquired digital postcard technology provider StoryQuest last year, launched various new sales productivity solutions and partnered with organizations like Salesforce.com.
“Goldman Sachs has been an aggressive investor in technology, specifically investing in the growth of sales and marketing cloud software, which is our market,” O’Connell said. “They found SAVO because they’re really knowledgeable investors in our space.”
The cash from Goldman Sachs and others will help SAVO to expand operations globally and to further develop it application offerings: “Where we put much of this investment will be to grow sales and marketing and servicing our customers,” O’Connell said.
On top of that, the funding round will help to steadily grow the SAVO team to about 300 employees by the end of 2015 (from the team’s current size of 250). Hiring will mainly be on sales and marketing teams as SAVO takes more and more products to market.
SAVO is regularly launching new sales productivity applications to “meet the ever-changing needs of modern salespeople and marketers” in any way it can. A few recent products like Sales Onboarding Pro, Sales Process Pro, SAVO Inspire and CRM Opportunity Pro for Microsoft Dynamics CRM do just that. Also on the horizon in 2014 are some “breakthrough” mobile applications to be added to this list, O’Connell said: “We have a busy schedule ahead of us for the rest of the year.”
