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SteelBrick, a price quoting software company, hasn’t been in Chicago long, yet about a year after moving the bulk of its team from the San Francisco Bay Area the startup has secured over $30 million in investment, $18 million of which came in a Series B funding round this week. SteelBrick’s rapid growth is energized by tackling a problem almost every business deals with: producing price quotes.
SteelBrick’s software is an add-on to customer relationship management giant Salesforce.com. When sales representatives go to quote items they often resort to excel sheets, Google forms, or even handwritten paper documents. SteelBrick’s software automates that work.
Godard Abel, CEO of SteelBrick, said the software can make big differences in the efficiency and productivity of sales teams. Cloudera, for example, a big data customer Abel cites, was having difficulty managing the discounts offered by their sales representatives. With over a billion in funding, their dealings had lost discipline as they grew.
“They clearly felt that pricing was out of control,” said Abel. “We added automatic rules and workflow to manage discounting.”
That meant sales representatives wouldn’t have to wait around for email approval, and wouldn’t have to memorize the company’s pricing discount rules.
“It makes the approval process a lot more efficient,” said Abel. Instead of focusing on administrative work sales representatives can do what they do best: sell.
Abel claims by implementing automated quoting SteelBrick’s software has had a real effect on Cloudera’s bottom line.
“They’ve seen their renew rates go up and their revenue has gone up,” said Abel.
SteelBrick wants to reproduce results like Cloudera’s by aggressively growing customers in the United States as well as in Europe and Asia. Five years down the road, Abel expects the company to do about 40 percent of its business abroad. Those numbers are in line with SteelBrick partner Salesforce.com’s customer distribution.
Salesforce is the world’s biggest CRM SaaS company, with over 100,000 customers, and Abel sees the CRM platform as a great building foundation for SteelBrick. In kind, Salesforce.com sees SteelBrick’s add-on as great for their customers. To prove the point, they invested in SteelBrick’s last round.
“The investor we are most excited about is Salesforce,” said Abel. “That’s huge validation. We think it will be very helpful in selling to all of their customers.”
As more and more of business moves to mobile phones, Salesforce’s mobile CRM should also provide a good platform for SteelBrick’s growth.
“We are seeing a ton of demand around Salesforce1 mobile app,” said Abel. “To the extent [sales representatives] can review quotes and share quotes right from their cell phone they can save a lot of time.”
Most business-to-business software companies don’t offer good mobile apps. SteelBrick’s ability to piggyback on the Salesforce1 mobile app will give it a big advantage.
“It’s going to be a huge growth driver for us,” said Abel.
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SteelBrick's new Chicago offices
To fuel all of that growth SteelBrick is aggressively hiring sales representatives, marketers and software developers. The company has grown from 5 to about 75 employees in the last year.
“The next year the plan is to double that again,” said Abel. “We plan to grow to about 150 people. Ninety will be in Chicago.”
Abel sees SteelBrick’s new Chicago location as a unique advantage.
“Some people say there’s more talent in the Bay, but there’s often more competition,” said Abel.
Originally founded in San Mateo, California Abel has shifted the company’s employee base to Chicago. Abel’s first company BigMachines was founded in Chicago, so now SteelBrick is filling its ranks with alumni from that company.
“A lot of hiring has been out of our network,” said Abel. “We can offer really unique hiring value proposition. Give people a chance to grow a career within a fast growing company.”
SteelBrick announced on Thursday that it has closed an $18 million Series B led by Shasta Ventures with participation from existing investors Emergence Capital, several of SteelBrick’s executives, and new investor Salesforce Ventures.
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