Crayon, the leading competitive intelligence platform for the enterprise, today announced a $22 million Series B financing led by Baird Capital with participation from Baseline Ventures, Bedrock Capital, C&B Capital and Oyster Funds. Crayon also welcomed Gaingels as an investor in the Series B as part of our commitment to diversity, equity & inclusion. The company’s total capital raised to date is $38 million. Crayon will use the funding to accelerate product development and expand its team. The company also announced Baird Capital’s Benedict Rocchio joined its Board of Directors.
Crayon helps mid-sized and large enterprises capture, analyze and act on competitive intelligence to drive better execution & decision-making in all areas of the business. More than 500 customers including Discover, Dropbox, Gong, Intuit, SurveyMonkey, Zendesk and ZoomInfo, rely on Crayon to power competitive intelligence efforts across their sales, marketing, product and executive teams. Crayon’s platform looks both within the organization and externally, generating insights from more than 300 million sources and enabling customers to publish, share and leverage intelligence in a variety of formats and frequencies to match stakeholder needs. From battlecards to newsletters, alerts and dashboards, Crayon integrates with CRM, chat, sales enablement and knowledge sharing platforms to ensure teams never miss a competitive development or opportunity.
Competitive intelligence should be a strategic priority for every company with at least one competitor in their space. Standing out and differentiating through product design, packaging and messaging is crucial, with 75% of technology buyers claiming they don’t understand how vendors are different[1]. And with nearly one third of all sales pitches lost to competitors[2], discovering and sharing compelling insights can mean the difference between winning or losing a competitive deal for businesses. According to Crayon’s 2021 State of Competitive Intelligence Report, which surveyed more than 1,000 companies, over 60 percent of businesses report competitive intelligence has positively impacted revenue, a 17 percent increase from their 2019 report.
“It has always been critical that businesses respond with speed and urgency to competitive shifts because competitive intelligence informs everything from product launches to pricing strategies to marketing campaigns. But there’s traditionally never been a good way to pull that off,” said Jonah Lopin, co-founder and CEO of Crayon. “Traditionally, gathering this data was a highly manual, time-intensive and expensive process. But today there’s a far better way to compete that’s software driven. Our platform captures competitive intelligence programmatically in real-time and empowers teams to take timely action towards increased sales and better differentiation in their market.”
