Sales tech startup Outreach raises $17.5 million in part from Microsoft Ventures

Laurent Giret

Sales acceleration platform Outreach has announced yesterday that its has raised $17.5 million in new Series B round led by Trinity Ventures, with participation from Microsoft Ventures as well as previous investors Mayfield, MHS Capital and Floodgate (via GeekWire). These new funds will allow the company to continue developing its communication platform as well as expanding their marketing and enterprise sales teams, with Outreach CEO and co-founder Manuel Medina explaining to Geekwire:

The environment is very competitive, but this positions us well with a big cash war chest and the ability to bring in more engineers and double down in the parts where we’re strong, which is product and engineering.

Before co-founding the sales automation platform, Medina previously worked at Microsoft as a Director of Business Development before becoming CEO of hiring platform GroupTalent. Through his new company, he is building a data-driven platform which allow sales team to automate their workflow across channels and reach their sales goals more easily. While Outreach’s technology is already used by sales professionals at Adobe, CenturyLink, Adroll, AppDynamics, and Zillow, Medina shared to Geekwire that the platform will soon add support for Microsoft Dynamics following the previous integration of Salesforce’s CRM technology, and the cloud-based application will also soon leverage Microsoft’s Azure cloud and Amazon Web Services cloud technologies.

While it’s been only a month since Microsoft established its new venture capital arm, Microsoft Ventures has already invested in several companies including Indian CRM chat service Helpshift as well as data enrichment and crowdsourcing copany CrowdFlower. Microsoft Ventures Corporate Vice President Nagraj Kashyap shared the following statement in the press release:

“At Microsoft Ventures, we are very excited about the next generation of cloud-based enterprise applications,” said , Microsoft Ventures. “Outreach certainly fits the bill, harnessing the power of the cloud to deliver an elegant, unique solution to satisfy enterprise sales team needs.”