SAN FRANCISCO — Connect The Dots, a network intelligence platform that uses AI to map and manage career-long professional relationships, has connected with a $15 million Series A funding round led by Norwest Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors Cloud Apps Capital Partners and Velvet Sea Ventures.
This round brings Connect The Dots’ total funding to $20 million, which will be used to scale the company’s behavior-based relationship graph of all people and companies.
Connect The Dots analyzes email metadata to deliver users a richly detailed view of users’ relationships and contacts. Users can opt in to share their relationships with close contacts, delivering invaluable insights into who knows who and how well they know each other.
“For sales teams, the network intelligence our platform provides is transformative,” said Drew Sechrist, founder, and CEO of Connect The Dots. “Sales has become a slog. Instead of playing the cold outreach lottery, they can jump straight to real opportunities founded on strong relationships. This round of funding is going to make 2022 a busy year for us, and we are thrilled to have backing from investors who see our vision and can help us to get there.”
Senior executives have access to years’ worth of email history containing not just thousands of individual and company contacts, but also a trove of behavioral metadata. The frequency, duration and nature of email exchanges offers rich context for each individual relationship that, until now, has never been tapped.
“As a former senior vice president of Product at Salesforce, I instantly saw how powerful a platform like Connect The Dots could be,” said Scott Beechuk, partner at Norwest Venture Partners. “Every company is under pressure to innovate, recruit top talent and sell bigger deals, and all of that is infinitely easier when you can tap into relationships. LinkedIn became one of the most valuable tech companies in the world by digitizing people’s professional networks. Connect the Dots goes even further by providing detailed, actionable insight that no other platform can offer.”
“Connect The Dots is the missing link in relationship selling that none of the other networks have solved at scale with elegance,” said Elay Cohen, CEO of SalesHood, and former senior vice president of Sales Productivity at Salesforce. “There’s no other system that is developed with such thoughtfulness and experience around how you manage real-life relationships online. This isn’t just another SaaS platform. This is the future of business networking.”
Connect The Dots recently surveyed 350 salespeople, who emphasized the value of warm introductions and the challenges of leveraging colleagues’ networks. The best deals come from warm connections or their existing network, 58% of respondents said. But 67% said they had lost valuable contacts and had to start from scratch, usually from losing access to email or CRM from their previous job. And 40% reported that it would be very painful to see who their coworkers know that they don’t.
Connect The Dots says its platform will be free forever to individual users, with paid options offering enhanced controls and additional functionality for businesses.
