Pipedrive today announced that it has closed its $9 million Series A round led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Paua Ventures and existing investors, Rembrandt Venture Partners and AngelPad, the latter of which incubated Pipedrive in 2012.

The Series A round will help accelerate Pipedrive's growth by building more product technology, marketing more broadly and delivering greater services to its expanding worldwide customer base. Prior to this round, Pipedrive raised $4.4 million in seed funding backed by Rembrandt Venture Partners, Monashees Capital, AngelPad, Storm Ventures, TMT Investments, and angel investors. Pipedrive currently has 77 employees based in the U.S. and Estonia.

'Pipedrive's growing base of more than 10,000 paying small business customers shows that the company's simple, intuitive approach to helping them sell better by visualizing the sales pipeline works,' said Alex Ferrara, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. 'We invested in Pipedrive because we believe that it has the potential to be the CRM tool of choice for small businesses globally.'

Pipedrive's recently appointed CEO, Steve Oriola, highlights the significance of this milestone: 'This represents Pipedrive's success and momentum in meeting the sales software needs of potentially millions of small businesses around the world,' said Oriola, who has 20 plus years of experience helping early stage tech companies scale including 10 years with Constant Contact. 'This round will enable us to significantly accelerate our growth by hiring more talented employees to further develop and market our software to our growing customer base.'

Pipedrive's customers include fast-growing tech companies such as Fortumo, a mobile payments company, Postmates, an on-demand delivery platform, FalconSocial, a social media platform and Blippar, an augmented reality ad platform. Its customers also include small businesses in other industries such as 360 Services, a company that provides fire protection services to businesses and Social Driver, a digital agency that launches websites and runs social media campaigns.

'We signed up with Pipedrive when they first started and still use it today,' said Martin Koppel, CEO and co-founder of Fortumo. 'What I like about Pipedrive is that it's built by real salespeople and not just developers and it buries complex functionality underneath an elegant and easy-to-use interface. Pipedrive helped me back when we were building Fortumo and continues to help my sales team by giving them a visual representation of where we stand so no important deal slips through the cracks.'

Pipedrive is unique in the CRM software space as its roots are in direct sales. Pipedrive's co-founders were sales people themselves who experienced an increasing amount of pain using existing CRM software to manage their company's sales leads. They found that there simply wasn't a good solution for managing the company's sales pipeline. In 2010, they teamed up with talented developers to create Pipedrive, a simple yet powerful tool for getting a better visual overview of where leads are in the sales process so no important deal gets dropped.

About Pipedrive

Founded in 2010, Pipedrive provides simple, intuitive sales management software to small businesses. Designed by salespeople for salespeople, Pipedrive is unique in that it is built around the sales pipeline process providing a better overview of where leads are in the sales process so no important deal gets dropped. The company is based in both the U.S. and Estonia and has 77 employees serving more than 10,000 paying small business customers worldwide. Pipedrive has raised $13.4 million in funding backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, Paua Ventures, Rembrandt Venture Partners, Monashees Capital, AngelPad, Storm Ventures, TMT Investments, and angel investors. For more information, go to www.pipedrive.com and follow @Pipedrive on Twitter.

About Bessemer Venture Partners

Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) invests in early-stage, hyper-growth startups, partnering closely with entrepreneurs to build durable businesses. BVP is a global firm with offices in Menlo Park, Cambridge, New York, Bangalore, and Herzliya. With $4 billion under management, BVP invests anywhere from $100,000 to $75 million in innovative companies like Pinterest, Twilio, Box, LinkedIn, Shopify, Yelp, Skype and CornerstoneOnDemand. Over 100 BVP companies have gone public. Learn more at www.bvp.com and follow us on Twitter @BessemerVP.