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Venture Capital News: Nimble Grabs $1M in Funding

2012-01-05
SANTA MONICA, CA, Social business platform announced it has capped a successful initial launch year, resulting in $1 million in funding from Google Ventures and angel investors including Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, Jason Calacanis, Don Dodge, Dharmesh Shah, and others.
Nimble, the award-winning social business platform, today announced it has capped a successful initial launch year, resulting in $1 million in funding from Google Ventures and angel investors including Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, Jason Calacanis, Don Dodge, Dharmesh Shah, and others. To date, Nimble has achieved significant growth milestones, including global expansion and market penetration in Europe and Asia Pacific with more than 25,000 users, 2,700 companies supported by 250 solution partners.

"The year 2011 has been a landmark year for Nimble," said Jon Ferrara, CEO, Nimble. "When we introduced Nimble, we promised our customers a new way of doing social business by empowering them to listen, engage, embrace, enchant, and grow their customer relationships. We delivered on that promise with a revolutionary CRM platform where small- to medium-sized businesses can easily transform their social communities into customers for life."

Nimble has garnered numerous industry awards including the "DEMO GOD" award, PC Magazine's Editors' Choice Award, Gartner Cool Vendor recognition for the Social Software & Collaboration category, and has been named a "Company to Watch" on Paul Greenberg's "2011 CRM Watch List" published by ZDNet. The company has been a Finalist for Red Herring's Top 100 Global award and a "Finalist" on the "2012 CRM Watch List."

"I'm excited to be part of the Nimble team," added Mark Cuban, investor. "I think their CRM service is one of the best tools any small to medium size business that wants to increase sales and productivity can have at their disposal."

"Some companies are trying to bring business applications to the web or leverage cloud infrastructure. Others add social or mobile features to existing applications as discrete capabilities," said Don Dodge, angel investor. "Nimble started fresh and took the best of CRM, social media, and cloud infrastructure, and built it into a powerful social business platform."

Nimble's Vision - Life Is Social, Business Is Social

Nimble, created by CRM visionary and GoldMine co-founder Jon Ferrara, is the only solution that empowers small businesses in today's socially connected world to collaborate more efficiently, and to listen and engage with their community to attract and retain the right customers. According to Gartner, the Social CRM market will exceed $1 billion worldwide by 2013, and small businesses especially are looking for ways to optimize social networking for their business needs. Nimble's core vision is that not only is life social, but business is social.

"The tools we use for connections and interactions with business and friends and the way we communicate are at a crossroads," Ferrara said. "Nimble is a revolution and an evolution in the way we do business, by empowering businesses to engage, nurture and grow customers and companies in the social customer age."

Nimble is establishing itself as a leading Social Relationship Manager by:

- Bringing Social Relationship Management and Collaboration to an entire
company
- Extending Nimble's Social Business platform with Sales and Marketing
functionality
- Delivering on a Social Business strategy with true competitive
business advantages

About Nimble

Since its initial launch, Nimble has quickly established itself as a leading Social Relationship Manager. Publications around the world have recognized Nimble as a revolutionary Social Business solution. The platform was awarded PC Magazine "Editors' Choice" as well as the coveted "DEMO God" award from a field of hundreds of start-up contenders. It has also been recognized by leading analyst firm, Gartner, as a "Cool Vendor" for Social Software and Collaboration and placed on "The CRM Watchlist 2011″ by Social CRM expert and best-selling author, Paul Greenberg.

Nimble was founded in 2009 to help small businesses transform their communities into business opportunities. Nimble opens a whole new channel for businesses to engage customers in a two-way dialogue, leveraging the power of traditional CRM and social media with its web-based social CRM platform. Located in Santa Monica, Nimble is in the heart of the Southern California tech community. Please join the conversation on Nimble's Facebook page at www.facebook.com/nimble , LinkedIn and on Twitter @nimble.

About Jon Ferrara, CEO, Nimble

A social entrepreneur at heart, Jon Ferrara founded GoldMine Software in 1989 where he served as the executive vice president of the company until it was sold in 2000. GoldMine is one of the best selling CRM products that helped pioneer the entire Sales Force Automation (SFA) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) market. During this time, Ferrara was awarded the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award while GoldMine was named PC Magazine's Editor's Choice in 1993 and again in 1995, 1996 and 1997.

After selling GoldMine and watching the immense rise in power social media was experiencing, Ferrara entered the start up world again when he noticed a distinct lack of any products that effectively combined Relationship Management, Social Listening and Engagement, and Collaboration with Sales and Marketing. In 2009, Jon founded Nimble to create an extensive Social Business platform to fill this gap.

About Google Ventures

Google Ventures is the venture capital arm of Google Inc. We seek to discover and help develop great companies, and believe in the power of entrepreneurs to do amazing things. Our investments range from seed to late stage, across a broad range of industries, including consumer Internet, digital media, software, hardware, and biotechnology. We embrace the challenge of helping young companies grow from the proverbial garage to global relevance.
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