Today, I’m thrilled to announce that Vivun has secured $75M in Series C funding led by Salesforce Ventures, with participation from new investor Tiger Global as well as full participation from existing investors Menlo Ventures, Accel, and Unusual Ventures. The funding will be used to expand Vivun’s Buyer Experience platform, the first of its kind in the SalesTech industry. 

Since our seed round in 2019, we’ve been on a mission to change B2B selling as we know it. With my co-founders John Bruce, Dominique Darrow, Claire Bruce, and Joseph Miller, we created a new enterprise software category for PreSales and brought our first product, Hero by Vivun®, to market. We signed up amazing customers such as Snowflake and Dell who shared our vision early on.

In our most recent fiscal year, Vivun: 

• Grew annual recurring revenue (ARR) more than 4x.
• Surpassed 100 employees by expanding its team more than 120%.
• Increased its customer count more than 160%, a base that includes high-growth startups as well as publicly-traded enterprises across hi-tech, telecom, manufacturing, and financial services verticals. 

Buyer Experience is a new category of enterprise software that has emerged in response to the way B2B buyers enter into sales cycles. Buyers have become sales-proof. They no longer buy from salespeople themselves, trusting the relationship and the person to deliver the desired outcome. Instead, they demand value at every step, total transparency, and the ability to run the sales process their way. Many of them are digital natives and are used to getting everything they need via self-directed research and free trials. When they do engage with vendors, they want targeted conversations with product experts.

Let’s take a moment to unpack the idea of the sales-proof buyer. In part, it’s simply a recognition that buyers are more averse to dealing directly with sales reps, and want to run their own cycles with complete autonomy. But we also need to ask how and why that happened. COVID has accelerated digitizing B2B selling, yielding more informed buyers and a focus on product. Product-Led Growth has put a spotlight on experts (PreSales) over Sales reps. New sales playbooks are being written focused on success/outcomes over signing (i.e. smaller ACV then grow), and it’s never been more critical to ensure the right technical fit early in the sales process. 

There’s a new reality in B2B selling, and buyers expect more in the sales process; however, companies continue to rely on outdated tactics that are increasingly ineffective: call recording, email sequencing, and poor resourcing of the supporting sales teams. As a consequence of this, we’ve never been more fired up to drive the future of B2B selling by delivering incredible buyer experiences.

Many companies have woken up to these new realities and have invested in buyer experiences. We have an incredible and diverse customer base from promising startups to established enterprises—Elastic, Harness, Okta, Cloudera, Iterable, Branch, and more—all of who want to move away from old-school sales-driven tactics to deliver hands-on, collaborative, value-first buyer experiences that earn prospects’ and customers’ trust through total transparency. “Companies that deliver great buying experiences grow twice as fast as their competition” (Gartner). 

I couldn’t be more excited for Vivun to be backed by tech industry visionaries and leaders to shape the future of B2B selling. Want to help to drive this change? We’re hiring!