Crayon Raises $22 Million Series B to Empower Mid-market & Large Enterprises With Competitive Intelligence

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.

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Jonah Lopin, co-founder and CEO of Crayon (Photo: Business Wire)

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.”

“Companies are drowning in data today and dedicating more resources -- both technology dollars and human capital -- to better understand and make use of it,” said Benedict Rocchio, Partner with Baird Capital and new board member of Crayon. “As a longtime active investor in the marketing technology space, Baird Capital saw the clear need for how Crayon's approach streamlines the vast amounts of data with a single source of truth for all competitive insights. Jonah and the Crayon leadership team have a proven track record of building marketing tools that simplify this level of complexity at scale. They are putting marketers in the enviable position of offense, pursuing ideas they know will work and mitigating the risk of being blindsided by a competitor.”

Crayon leads the competitive intelligence software category - recognized by Forrester Research in their New Wave as the Leader in Market and Competitive Intelligence Platforms, and consistently a leader among multiple categories in G2, based on thousands of reviews by real customers. Based in Boston, the company has nearly 100 employees and expects to double headcount over the next 12 months.

About Crayon

Crayon is the leading competitive intelligence platform that enables businesses to track, analyze, and act on everything happening outside their four walls. More than 33,000 Competitive Intelligence professionals rely on Crayon for a current, holistic view of their business to win sales, save time and costs, and develop long-term revenue and relationships. Based in Boston, Crayon is empowering mid-market and Fortune 500 companies every day with actionable insights to win. For more information go to https://www.crayon.co.

About Baird Capital

Baird Capital makes venture capital, growth equity and private equity investments in strategically targeted sectors around the world. Having invested in more than 320 companies over its history, Baird Capital partners with entrepreneurs and, leveraging its executive networks, strives to build exceptional companies. Baird Capital provides operational support to its portfolio companies through teams on the ground in the United States, Europe, and Asia, a proactive portfolio operations team, and a deep network of relationships, which together strive to deliver enhanced shareholder value. Baird Capital is the direct private investment arm of Robert W. Baird & Co. For more information, please visit BairdCapital.com.

^[1] Gartner: “The Sad State of Differentiation for Technology Providers and What to Do About It”

^[2] CSO Insights: “The 2018-2019 Sales Performance Report”

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