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Business software review company G2 Crowd announced today a $2.3 million seed round. The Highland Park-based enterprise web company now has $4.3 million in total funding.
In 2000, G2 Crowd co-founders Godard Abel, Matt Gorniak and Tim Handorf founded configuration and quotation software company BigMachines. Before selling it for $50 million in 2011, Abel and his co-founders foresaw a huge hole in the enterprise software market, and from there G2 Crowd was born.
G2 Crowd brings crowd-sourced reviews, used often by customers on sites such as TripAdvisor and Yelp, to the enterprise software industry. Since its launch in 2013, G2 Crowd has rapidly grown to more than 50,000 enterprise software buyers visiting their site each month to read reviews. More than 13,000 in-depth reviews have been added to the site, taking the multi-trillion dollar software industry by storm.
G2 Crowd and CEO Godard Abel plan on using the new funds to ramp up the growth of the company’s real-time platform for user reviews of business software.
“G2 Crowd will be using the additional funding to accelerate its innovation and site development as we will be adding more powerful features to guide business software buyers to the best fit products,” Abel said. “We will also use the funding to grow our community building teams to both build our review content across software categories and to engage with more vendors who can take advantage of our site for real-time validation of high customer success and demand capture.”
Enterprise software giants such as Salesforce.com and HootSuite have taken notice of G2 Crowds platform and are marketing their G2 Crowd reviews as validation for high customer satisfaction and as inputs for their marketing engines.
As part of the funding, G2 Crowd added former ExactTarget CMO Tim Kopp and Chicago Ventures’ Stuart Larkins to their board: “Both Tim and Stuart bring extensive experience in the business software and digital marketing industries, and will help guide our strategy and execution,” Abel said.
