Addapptation has announced a $1.3 million seed funding round led by 2048 Ventures in a tweet. It was supported by East Coast Angels, The Millworks II Fund and several other angel investors from New Hampshire where the firm is based. Addapptation was founded by Sumner and Carla Vanderhoof with the aim of redesigning the UX of Salesforce into something that is more intuitive.
Speaking to TechCrunch Co-Founder and CEO Sumner said that its goal is to ‘build a user experience platform for enterprise tools like Salesforce’. He commented: “Our goal is to help make simple, easy to use Salesforce.com solutions built on the Addapptation UX platform.”
Who are Addapptation?
Founded three years ago the husband and wife team have bootstrapped the company until now. In the last year it has accelerated growth, tripling its staff during 2019. Sumner is no stranger to growing a company. He helped to build up V2 Strategic Advisors, a Salesforce consultancy which worked with brands such as Houston Rockets, Hearst Corporation, Conde Nast Media Group and LVMH.
Their intent with this new venture is to enable companies to build applications on top of Salesforce easily. The platform is modular and has a microservices architecture which uses Salesforce as a data hub. This approach dramatically decreases the amount of manual coding required to build applications.
A blog by 2048 Ventures co-founder and Managing partner Alex Iskold explains some of the reason why they made the investment in the company. Notable is that fact that the company already supports thousands of users in 20 enterprise companies which include Comcast and Ingram Micro.
The platform already has more than 40 solutions that enhance Salesforce including:
- A KPI Portal to solve the lack of KPI visibility in Salesforce
- Real Time commission tracker
- Customer Scorecard and Customer Journey to minimise missed opportunities
Its solutions mainly focus on sales operations and executive users of Salesforce. Furthermore it believes that they are developed ten times faster than traditional Salesforce projects.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
Sumner also noted that the company does not compete with Salesforce. It also does not appear on the AppExchange yet. If the company shows success during 2020 and needs further funding will Salesforce Ventures become an investor?
The comment made in TechCrunch is noteworthy, is the Addapptation UI platform is platform agnostic? That is an interesting statement. The Salesforce market is huge and one that both Vanderhoof’s are familiar with. It will be interesting to see whether they have any plans to extend the reach of the platform to other ecosystems. Possibly some of which are in a greater need than Salesforce.
The challenges that Addapptation may have is that Salesforce is also constantly working on its UI. Also, the platform components that Addapptation has built seem to compete more with App vendors such as Upland Altify.
