Chapel Hill-based RepVue closed a $5 million round, the company announced this morning. The funding will be used to further RepVue’s mission of transforming how sales professionals make career decisions.
RepVue, which operates as a sales organization ratings platform, secured the money in a round led by Austin-based S3 Ventures, with participation from Maryland’s TDF Ventures and existing investors Knoll Ventures and Alerion Ventures. Scot Wingo’s Triangle Tweener Fund, GTMfund, and individual industry leaders like Salesloft CEO Kyle Porter, Atlassian’s former CFO Alex Estevez and Sales Assembly’s CRO Matt Green also came on board as investors in the round.
To date, RepVue has garnered more than 60,000 ratings of 11,000 sales organizations globally. Ratings consider data on quota attainment, culture, lead flow, compensation, and product-market fit. (We first profiled RepVue in October, 2019.)
With this funding, Founder and CEO Ryan Walsh said the company will invest in marketing as well as its growing employer data platform, which enables hiring teams to gain a competitive edge with unique data insights and targeted access to sales talent. They already have early adopter customers in Demand Science, Lob, Highspot, Datadog, Elastic, Metadata.io and others.
“It’s validating just from the standpoint of other people are also starting to see the power of what we’re building and recognize the growth and the work that we’ve put in to date,” Walsh said. “We’re all excited to continue to be gainfully employed for the next X number of quarters and years.”
With a background of more than 20 years in B2B and software sales—including 16 at Morrisville-based ChannelAdvisor—Walsh founded RepVue as a way to reduce sales rep turnover, which has historically been much higher than in non-sales roles. During the hiring process, Walsh said, sales reps often only have a few minutes to ask questions about the job that will help them decide if the role is a good fit.
“There’s never been a great way for sales professionals to access trusted, structured data that they could leverage to make the best career decision for themselves,” Walsh said. “RepVue was born out of the notion that if we can collect and aggregate enough data, we can provide a platform where sales professionals can access information about companies to very quickly and easily make a decision for themselves as to whether that’s right for their career.”
Wingo’s Triangle Tweener Fund joins round
Scot Wingo, the CEO and Founder of on-demand car care startup Spiffy and the former CEO of ChannelAdvisor, was quick to invest in RepVue with his new Triangle Tweener Fund. Wingo said RepVue checked every single box they look for: 10 people or $10 million annual recurring revenue, a local startup and a huge total addressable market—essentially every company with salespeople.
Walsh served as ChannelAdvisor’s CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) for several years, and Wingo actually recruited him right out of college 23 years ago. Wingo said Walsh is high on his list of proudest achievements in the set of incredible entrepreneurs that came from ChannelAdvisor’s team.
RepVue adds valuable information on both sides of the sales rep and recruiting equation, Wingo said.
“RepVue is a vertical talent marketplace, and like a product or service marketplace, is exhibiting accelerating growth thanks to network effects,” Wingo said. “Even with a potential recession on the horizon, everyone is always looking to beef up or upgrade their sales talent, so I think RepVue will be immune from economic cycles.”
With the money, Walsh looks forward to growing the RepVue team, especially in the onshore development department. They are looking to hire for at least five to eight product development roles by the end of the year.
Walsh said they sought out investors who understand what they are building and have both operating experience and the ability to add value in network-effect businesses as well.
“My expectation is not that an investor is going to be the end-all, be-all, or going to grow our business for us,” Walsh said. “We’re ultimately responsible for growing the business. What we want is a supportive partner who has some operating experience that we can lean on from time to time.”
Walsh said moving forward, his goals for RepVue are straightforward. It comes back to the original vision he set out to achieve when he started the company in 2018.
“Our goals are to serve as many salespeople as possible from a career standpoint, and enable them to be as successful as they can in their career by giving them access to data that they would have never had access to,” Walsh said.
