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Social Sales and Marketing Firm Nimble Garners $9M

By Paula Bernier
Executive Editor, TMC

Social sales and marketing solutions provider Nimble has raised $9 million in a Series A round.

Imagen Capital Partners led the funding. Google (News - Alert) Ventures; Indicator Ventures; Mark Cuban’s Radical Investments; and a consortium including Jason Calacanis, Don Doge, and Howard Lindzon also participated.

Nimble (News - Alert) bills its solution as a new kind of CRM for small and medium businesses. The cloud-based offering brings together calendar, contact, and email, Nimble CEO Jon Ferrera said. That way, workers don’t have to spend a lot of time gathering background on people by doing Google searches and the like, he said, it just presents contact information whether the user is in their email program or the Web via their computer or smartphone. And the Nimble solution is layered onto the Google G Suite and Microsoft (News - Alert) Office 365 platforms for ease of use.

“Today’s legacy CRMs are too complex and hard to use, and we end up spending more time maintaining data in our CRMs than letting our CRM platforms work for us. The resulting low end user adoption is a significant cause of failure for CRMs,” said Ferrara. “At Nimble we’ve solved the end user adoption issue and have built a CRM that end users love to use by seamlessly integrating with Office 365 and Google G Suite Emails, Contacts and Calendars, eliminating tedious data entry, and automating repetitive tasks. Nimble lives where users work: in email, the browser, and on their mobile devices.”

Ferrara, who also co-founded successful CRM company GoldMine Software Corp., released Nimble’s first paid product back in 2013. With this new funding, he and the rest of the Nimble team plan to do more digital marketing, including influencer marketing, and bring in more engineering and sales resources to take Nimble to the next level.

Nimble has already attracted 100,000 unique visitors to its website and it has

10,000 paying customers. The company is currently at breakeven, Ferrara said, and it expects to be profitable in about 18 months after its investments based on the new funding begin to bear fruit.

In other recent news from Nimble, the company has come out with a free add-on for Microsoft Outlook on iOS. It makes it easy for Outlook users to get Nimble contact information directly from their email messages.