Collaboration software company Wrike raises $10M

Wrike will use the money to boost its product and marketing

Project management and collaboration software company Wrike has landed $10 million in Series A funding, it was announced on Tuesday.

The new money came from Bain Capital Ventures (BCV), the venture arm of Bain Capital. Founded in 2006, the company was bootstrapped until it raised $1 million in private equity financing from TMT Investments in June of 2012. 

The reason the company began to take money now it so expand its reach, Andrew Filev, Founder and CEO of Wrike, told me in an interview.  "We help thousands of people across the globe, but we want to reach millions."

To that end, the money will be used to boost both product and marketing. That means expanding the enterprise version of the product, developing new products for mobile and "leveling up the platform game."

"We have good APIs and integrations, but we want to build to next level so we achieve thousands of integrations," said Filev. "And that requires a product and marketing push."

The company will also use it beef up intelligence. Some of the company's clients have hundreds of thousands of tasks, said Filev and "all that data gives a lot of intelligence." The company will begin to analyze that data, and presenting it to the client in a visualized form.

Wrike is a provider of online project management and collaboration software. It provides teams with a platform for collaborating on multiple projects in one workspace in real time.

The company has brought two worlds together: work management and collaboration, said Filev.

The collaboration side of the equation provides features such as file sharing and real time messaging. It connects workers e-mail, Google Apps, Dropbox and Box, and shares the relevant files with theur co-workers.

The work management side has to do with helping to keep track of what has to be done and when. It allows team managers to know what someone has done over two weeks, what they are working on now, and what the marketing plan is for the month, whenever they want to know it.

"This kind of information used to be extremely hard to gather. If a manager was interested in where a project stood they had to wait for weekly meetings or quarterly planning updates," said Filev. "That makes things run slower. Getting an answer a week from now means they were operating on old data, leading them to make bad decisions."

Wrike has 4,000 customers using the premium version of the product, companies both large and small. They range from startups to Fortune 1000 companies.

Typical customers for Wrike include marketing departments, where managers can see whats going on with their projects, and software teams, which use Wrike to collaboratively discuss and brainstorm ideas. It can also help them respond to customer requests, and see how they have traveled through the company.

The types of organizations that use Wrike is extremely diverse, Filev told me; everything from churches, airlines to universities. The company's customers include Google, Adobe, PayPal, McDonalds, Ticketmaster, Nissan, Electronic Arts, HTC and DirectTV.

In addition to the funding news, Write has added two new members to its board of directors: BCV’s Indranil Guha and serial entrepreneur Igor Shoifot.

Filev admitted that there are many other companies out there that provide similar services but reduced them to "noise."

"There's no single one that we would be afraid of. A lot of things we do first, then three years down the road the others do it," he said. "Our biggest concern is not a competitor, its the status quo and how we have to change behavior."

Filev compared it to people joining gyms: everybody wants to be in good shape, but many people don't buy gym memberships. And those that do don't always use them.

Wrike has encountered similar problems with collaborative software.

"Every company wants to more efficient and more transparent, but that requires them changing the way they do business," he said. "The goal is to cut through the noise and get millions of businesses and educate them on how to facilitate a behavior change."

And that will happen over the next decade, he predicted.

"We do not believe that people will be managing tasks through e-mail ten years from now. Thinking about is in terms of productivity and waste, it doesn’t make sense for that information to be buried in e-mail."

Wrike is already showing signs that companies are ready to move to tools specifically designed to help them collaborate. The company has set a goals to double its revenue each year, and it "historically has met this goal," said Filev.

"Over the next couple of years are shooting for four times growth year to year."