Sometimes hard-charging serial entrepreneurs need a little reminder to take a step back and celebrate a team win.
In this case, it’s Vinay Bhagat, founder of the 1999 startup Convio — which he led to a $325 million exit in 2012.
Bhagat co-founded TrustRadius shortly after Convio’s acquisition. His new startup raised $5 million from investors in 2013 and another $2.1 million in 2016.
Today, Bhagat said his TrustRadius team had to remind him once again that celebrations were in order to toast to a fresh $5.5 million Series B.
The funding, led by local VC LiveOak Venture Partners and Silicon Valley-based Mayfield, will be used to triple TrustRadius’ employee headcount and invest in its product.
“I’m extremely proud of Convio, its impact on society and its great exit,” said Bhagat. “But I think we are building something that can be a materially larger company than Convio. We’re building something much bigger here.”
TrustRadius, which has reported two years of revenue growth and achieved positive operating cash flow before the latest funding, began as an open-source website for savvy business tech users to share reviews (think TripAdvisor but for B2B software).
Now, the startup offers a vendor review platform in addition to its free buyer/consumer-facing website.
TrustRadius’s new techstack, which Bhagat said the team built about 18 months ago, collects hundreds of verifiable B2B user reviews that can then be directly inserted into vendor marketing channels.
“Any buyer or seller can write a review,” Bhagat said. “Where our services come in is to drive the scaling of reviews through a structured approach. Then we put the content we’ve collected and verified into their go-to-market channels.”
One of TrustRadius’s 100+ clients includes local startup TrendKite. By streaming syndicated review content gathered by TrustRadius on TrendKite’s demo-request page, Bhagat said TrendKite saw an increase of 26 percent in lead conversion rates. Additionally, TrendKite reported a 15 percent acceleration rate bump in the total sales cycle, linked to TrustRadius.
Now the team is ready to grow, and fast. Bhagat said TrustRadius will be adding engineer, design, marketing, sales, recruiting and executive roles.
“It’s a given we look for intelligence,” Bhagat said. “I’ll also be looking for passion. When you’re trying to educate and change market behavior, a candidate with passion is incredibly important.”
As for the executive hires, Bhagat said having an Austin investor like LiveOak makes it a little easier.
“Having a local partner is extremely helpful in terms of understanding the candidate pool particularly at the executive level,” said Bhagat. “I’m heads down running my business, and they are out there meeting good executives all the time.”
If you’re curious about how Bhagat celebrated today’s sweet taste of funding, he said it involved an escape room and cocktails. Happy funding!
Image provided by TrustRadius.
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