Shawn Carpenter is at it again.
The Google vet and founding YCharts CEO this morning unveiled RepIQ, a platform designed to arm salespeople with the insights and tools they need to land a deal with a little more rhythm.
“I found it’s been extremely complex and really hard to leverage data in a sales scenario with the existing tools that are out there,” Carpenter said. “We’re launching RepIQ to provide a sort of 'Google Analytics for sales teams' and really leverage the data that's been created.”
This newest venture — his third by our count — comes out of the gate already backed with seed funding from some of Chicago’s top-billed investors, including Pritzker Group Venture Capital and Hyde Park Angels. Amicus Capital Partners and Arba (both of which were also early investors in Chicago successes like GrubHub and YCharts itself) also joined the round.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Carpenter said most sales teams use anywhere from seven to 15 software tools to help streamline their sales cycles, but because they exist in silos, it can be hard to corral all that data together to glean insights and actually solve more complex problems.
“Being able to put those tools together and get insights out of them is the key thing we’re going after,” he said.
One of the ways the platform is designed to help includes a database of companies a salesperson may use for prospecting. The current rolodex — some 500,000 companies, and growing — includes information on companies, including industry, team size, contact info, and even technology stack, to help identify potential customers.
Carpenter is joined by co-founder and CTO Jonathan Suchland, an Amazon alum who also has experience growing and scaling companies (Suchland is the former CTO of Chicago’s Homefinder.com). Those collective experiences, Carpenter said, gives them an advantage as they start, once again, from scratch.
“I don’t think this will be easy, but I’ve been through this a couple times now, and I’ve seen both the good and bad things that happen as you launch. But I’ve also learned how to launch a company and how to scale it. Jonathan and I have both taken a concept to millions of users a couple of times. We’ve seen and have in our wheelhouse the strategies to do that,” he said.
At the moment, Carpenter and Suchland are the only two full-time employees working out of a 333 W. Wacker office. Carpenter said they’ve engaged a number of contractors who’ve also lent their weight.
Carpenter left YCharts in late 2015 and said he has been working on the project since the turn of the year. For the next few quarters, he said the duo is focused on working with early customers to validate both the solution and the value he said they create for companies.
Image via RepIQ.
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