At Grow.com, it’s our mission to provide the #1 business intelligence (BI) solution for SMBs. The reality is that the SMB market is largely ignored by most BI providers, leaving a huge group of growing companies without adequate tools to measure what matters in their business and access key insights. That’s why Grow makes it easy and affordable to visualize and share business performance in real time, so that companies and leaders of SMBs can reach their full potential. And we’re delighted to be helping over 12,000 users with more than 270,000 metrics continue driving growth through data.
Today, I’m proud to finally announce that Grow has raised a $16 million Series B round led by Toba Capital! We have big plans for this investment, and we’re ready to hit the ground running.
For a company like Grow, it’s great to have past investors continue to show faith in our company, our team, and our product by participating in another funding round. Toba Capital, Peterson Ventures, Pelion Venture Partners, and Kickstart Seed Fund have been influential partners for us, and we’re proud to continue working with them. We’re also incredibly proud to welcome HubSpot as a new investor and add new members to our board—I look forward to sharing more details about that in the coming weeks!
How We Got Here
It’s an exciting time to be at Grow—then again, I would say that about nearly the entire time we’ve been in business.
Grow launched in 2014, and we spent that year architecting and building the solution. 2015 was the year of finding product-market fit (but it felt more like the year of wandering around in the wilderness, miserable and unsure if we were really going to make it).
At the start of 2016, we added our talented Customer Success team and started to see the real power of our solution. With the help of CS and with new data transformation tools, our customers were able to understand their businesses and gain insights that they hadn’t had before. One customer told us, “This is like a drug for me. I’m seeing the whole company for the first time in 15 years.”
“This is like a drug for me. I’m seeing the whole company for the first time in 15 years.”
It was also the year we acquired our Series A funding, quadrupled the size of our team, and hit 10x growth. We added powerful new tools to the Grow platform, delivered 8x faster dashboard performance, and built a partner program to provide better connections with the apps our customers love most.
In 2017, we outgrew our second office and moved into a beautiful new space that gives our team much-needed space to collaborate and connect. We also hosted our first Data Driven Summit in Park City, Utah and welcomed over 200 attendees to get training from experienced industry experts on how to accelerate their growth through data. I loved getting to meet so many people who are eager to produce real results for their companies and learn more about the Grow platform.
Another highlight of the year was opening our EMEA office outside of London, UK. Our team across the pond has grown quickly and far surpassed our initial expectations, and we’re thrilled to be able to provide better service to our customers around the world.
I couldn’t be prouder of the work, creativity, and sheer grit that our team has put in to make each of these accomplishments not just possible, but remarkably successful.
Where We’re Going
From a product standpoint, 2017 also opened the door to some powerful changes that we’ll be making to the platform in the coming year.
Since adding Richard Tripp as our new chief product officer, we’ve done in-depth customer research to better understand our customers’ needs, as well as what pushes our most successful customers to the next level. We’ve already seen game-changing results through this research, and we’re looking forward to providing our customers with better tools and empowering them with the knowledge they need to drive real growth and achieve their goals.
VISUALIZING CUSTOMER ACQUISITION
We’ve learned that our most successful customers succeed with Grow because they use our platform to track and improve performance around their customer acquisition funnel. This means they are tracking marketing top of funnel activities like ad spend by channel, and on down the funnel to how it converts to revenue and sales rep performance.
I witnessed an example of this when I visited Edit Suits, one of Grow’s customers in London, UK this past fall. Patrick, the co-founder, was stoked to show me his KPIs and the improvement in conversions for each stage of the sales cycle that ultimately drove revenue growth. Grow was helping him measure and improve performance that no other software was able to provide at an affordable price point.
It was awesome to see Grow making such an impact for the Edit Suits team, and for me, it really reinforced that we’re on the right track, that our research is delivering the right insights.
We’ve reviewed hundreds of variations of this process, each one a little different, but each one also achieving the same goal of making that customer acquisition funnel easy to see and understand in a single dashboard. And over and over again we see, just as I saw with Edit Suits, that visualizing customer acquisition is key to helping businesses scale and grow.
APPLICATION IMPROVEMENTS
As we move forward, one of our goals is to make it easier to discover customer acquisition insights. The improved Grow application will include an easy configurator, meaning you won’t have to build each metric from scratch. This will dramatically simplify the process to get unique insights for your business.
Over the next several months, we’ll be investing in several new software engineering hires to improve the core application. Our plan is to make it easier to get business insights on the Grow platform and reduce or eliminate SQL required to perform certain popular functions. Not only will this make it easier for our current customers to build highly customized metrics, but it will allow less-technical users to get more use out of the platform without having to contact support.
THE #1 BI FOR SMBS
Since the birth of Grow, it has been our mission to provide a business intelligence tool that’s the right fit for SMBs. Too many BI solutions available today are too expensive or too complex, requiring internal IT staff to support the product. As such, the SMB market is left with few true options without making enormous compromises.
It’s hard to believe that such a huge market of eager entrepreneurs could be so underserved. But that’s also what makes it so exciting and fulfilling to be at Grow, to be helping SMBs win with data. We’re proud to be creating the easiest way for SMBs to visualize and share their business performance in real time, and helping companies and leaders reach their full potential.
Thank You
We’re thrilled to be able to supercharge our forward progress, and we’re confident that the future holds great things for Grow. The reality is that none of this would be possible without our team and our customers—especially those who provided us with hours of interviews and insight into their business and processes. I want to personally thank you for your support, and thank you for choosing Grow.
Thank you—
Rob Nelson
Founder & CEO
