Salesforce.com Inc.’s (NYSE:CRM) customer relationship management platform is very popular and currently claims almost a fifth of the market in revenue terms.
Scratch raises $13 million to simplify Salesforce’s CRM platform
The platform’s pervasiveness doesn’t imply popularity as it faces complaints that range from “too much data entry” and “clunky UI” and it can sometimes pause challenges to users. However, one start-up, Scratchpad, has raised $13 million in a bid to make Salesforce enjoyable and enhance productivity by creating a modern workspace on top of the platform. Founded in 2019 in San Francisco, Scratchpad has built a host of productivity tools spanning notes, tasks, search, spreadsheets, collaboration, Kanban boards, and many more.
Interestingly the startup combines the tools in a user-friendly interface to enable them to interact directly with workflows and sales data. The firm has been designed to free up personnel to do want they do best and it announced a $13 million Series A funding led by Craft Ventures. So far Scratchpad has raised around $16.6 million which includes a $3.6 million seed reported in October. Pouyan Salehi, the company’s CEO and co-founder indicated that although they were not looking to add capital, investors understood the vision of the company and the capital will help in accelerating the product road map.
Scratch built to ease work through Salesforce platform
Pouyan said that most revenue teams usually have highly educated and trained salespeople spending almost half of their time in administrative work rather than selling. The good news is Scratchpad reduces and almost eliminates administration time and this increases sales performance. He added that they created the Scratchpad platform from several conversations with sales agents and built it as per their needs. Most importantly the platform provides different views for pipeline management like the grid view, which is an inline Salesforce record editing that helps circumvent the need for spreadsheets.
The company operates a software-as-a-service business model with levels ranging from $39 per user team plan up to the customizable business plan.
