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Base CRM announced a $15 million Series B round last week led by RRE Ventures, Index Ventures and OCA Ventures. Base will be ramping up their hiring, specifically on the sales side to better handle demand, with aims of doubling their 95-person team by the end of 2014, CEO and founder Uzi Shmilovici said.
A few people will remain in Chicago, but most of the company's team will be moving to the Bay Area, where they will be making more hires. Shmilovici said the company is still finalizing the move, so cannot share details of how many employees will still be based in Chicago.
As they continue to grow their own team, Base will be further investing in their CRM product which competes largely with Salesforce.
“Our customers can expect to see an even faster pace of innovation," Shmilovici said. "After investing several years of putting together the building blocks for our platform, 2014 is all about taking advantage of that and building features that take advantage of mobility and intelligence.”
To make sure that every new feature is also launched on mobile, Base will also be amping up their design team, which will also be helping to build a new, improved version: "We will be working on a very exciting version of our product that will transform the way people think about business software," Shmilovici said.
This new funding, which came in less than a year after Base's Series A round, brings the company's total funding amount to over $22 million. The reason for such a fast close, Shmilovici said, is because his team's relationship with investors "is fantastic mainly due to the fact that we're all aligned around the mission of the company and the strategy: we all believe that CRM is ripe for disruption and we're all betting on the long term which is critical for healthy founder-investors relationships."
Although this funding isn't necessarily in line with recent proposals of Chicago being known as a bootstrapped city, Shmilovici said "it takes capital to build something meaningful at scale."
"Not every investor-backed startup changed the world," he said. "Far from that. But almost every company that changed the world was investor-backed."
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