We raised $45M to build the CRM that fits

Today we’re announcing a $45 million Series B led by Harbourline Ventures, with our existing investors joining the round. It brings the total we have raised to $63 million.

I want to use this post to explain what the money is for, and just as importantly, what it won’t change.

Where we are

We started Modal because every CRM we had used asked the business to fit the software. Sales teams with partners had nowhere to put them. Funds tracked rounds in spreadsheets beside the CRM. Customer success teams kept a second system because the first one only understood deals. We wanted a CRM whose data model was as flexible as a spreadsheet and as reliable as a database, and that filled itself in from the inbox.

Today, more than 4,000 teams run on Modal. We sync about 38 million emails and meetings for them every month. Customers have built over 31,000 custom objects, and the median team moves from its previous CRM in a single day. Most of that growth has come from people who used Modal at one company and brought it to the next.

What the money is for

Ask Modal

Last year we started answering questions from the records, emails and calls in a workspace, with sources for every claim. Ask Modal is now in beta with 300 teams, and it is the thing customers mention most in calls with us. A large share of this round goes into making it reliable enough that people trust it with forecasts and renewals, not just quick lookups.

Data model and imports

Custom objects are the reason many teams choose Modal, and there is a lot still to do: history for schema changes, more field types, and importers that understand the odd shapes that years of Salesforce and HubSpot administration leave behind.

Customer success, in more time zones

We will double the size of our customer success and solutions teams over the next year, with new hires in Europe and the Americas, so that every team on a paid plan has a named person to call during their working day.

What isn’t changing

• Pricing stays per seat and simple. Free for up to three seats, and read-only seats cost nothing on every plan. We won’t introduce per-record or per-email pricing.

• Your data stays yours. It is never used to train models, and you can export all of it, in full, whenever you like.

• The API stays complete. Everything you can do in the app, you can do through the API, on every plan.

• We stay small on purpose. We are 86 people today and expect to be around 150 by the end of next year. Not more.

Why Harbourline

We spoke to many investors. Harbourline was the one that asked to talk to our customers before talking to us, and then asked them about support response times rather than growth. Their partner, Elise Moreau, ran revenue operations at two software companies before she became an investor, and has spent more evenings than she would like to admit fixing CRM data. She joins our board.

Thank you

To our customers: thank you for the feature requests, the bug reports and the patience. Most of what is on our roadmap came from you. To our team: this round is a result of the work you have done for three years, and the work is far from finished.

If you want to help build it, we’re hiring.