CHICAGO, May 24, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- G2 Crowd, the leading B2B review platform, today announced the close of a $30 million series B funding round, led by Accel with participation from key industry executives, LinkedIn, Pritzker Group Venture Capital and G2 Crowd’s founders. G2 Crowd will use the new funds to accelerate the build-out of its review platform across B2B categories and to further grow its global community of contributors to offer buyers unique insights across tens of thousands of B2B products and related services.
“There is a paradigm shift occurring as B2B buyers increasingly behave like consumers, relying on authentic online reviews and social media to make purchase decisions and no other company is better suited to catalyze this market opportunity than G2 Crowd,” said Accel Partner, Arun Mathew. “Accel has a long history of investing in market leading companies like Facebook, Dropbox, Slack, and Atlassian, and G2 Crowd is no exception. The company’s rapid growth and customer buy-in from leading tech innovators lends an extremely influential voice to the industry.”
To date, G2 Crowd has amassed more than 170,000 verified-user reviews of business software and solutions, which are freely available to nearly one million site visitors each month. Over 230,000 business professionals have signed up to share their expertise and write reviews or participate in the conversation. The site includes more than 25,000 products, in more than 800 business solution categories. The 2016 fiscal year saw more than 300 percent growth for the company as over 800 technology leaders including Salesforce, Marketo, and IBM have signed on to leverage G2 Crowd’s unique user generated content in their own marketing programs.
“B2B buyers are increasingly looking for real-time insights from peers, and we see an incredible opportunity to double down on our innovation and review collation to provide unique buying insights across a broad range of business technology and related services,” said Tim Handorf, co-founder and CEO of G2 Crowd. “Our team will remain committed to focusing on putting the buyer first by delivering the highest level of trust and transparency for business buyers.”
G2 Crowd’s early efforts have defined a new industry. This new investment and initiative will help the company to expand on its current work, bringing its resources to new areas of the business marketplace and creating more transparency to the business solutions buying process.
Industry Leaders Speak Out About G2 Crowd
"G2 Crowd is an important partner in expanding online advocacy for IBM. The user review platform is giving us new ways to connect to our customers, hear their feedback about our products and services, and strengthen our culture of customer centricity." Kevin Eagan, Chief Digital Experience Officer, IBM
“Terminus is a pioneer and defining technology platform of the recently emerged account-based marketing category. As a disruptive software company, we do not fit the standard category definitions of traditional analyst firms. G2 Crowd recognizes that an evolving technology is not built around a definition, it is built around the needs of buyers and business. They work with our team to understand the industry need and create a resource where buyers can learn more about how account-based marketing software might benefit their business.” Eric Spett, CEO, Terminus
“The reviews and rankings and, ultimately, the research that comes out of all the data we get from G2 Crowd fuel our content pipeline throughout the year. It’s an incredibly powerful competitive intelligence tool for us—to understand what our customers think about the industry, Marketo, and other solutions in the space. Furthermore, we get powerful, real-time feedback about how our customers feel about doing business with Marketo.” Karen Steele, group vice president of corporate marketing, Marketo
About G2 Crowd
G2 Crowd, the world’s leading business solution review platform, leverages more than 170,000 user reviews to drive better purchasing decisions. Business professionals, buyers, investors, and analysts use the site to compare and select the best software and services based on peer reviews and synthesized social data. Every month, nearly one million people visit G2 Crowd’s site to gain unique insights. Co-founded by the founder and former executives of SaaS leaders like BigMachines (acquired by Oracle) and SteelBrick (acquired by Salesforce) and backed by more than $45 million in capital, G2 Crowd aims to bring authenticity and transparency to the business marketplace. For more information, go to G2Crowd.com.
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