RelateIQ

Market position

RelateIQ positioned itself against incumbent CRM and social CRM vendors such as Salesforce.com, Oracle and SAP, as part of a wave of big-data startups seeking to offer smarter, more consumer-friendly and mobile-first relationship management. It was ultimately acquired by one of those incumbents, Salesforce, in what TechCrunch described as Salesforce's largest deal since its $2.5 billion purchase of ExactTarget (sources 1, 2).

Unlike traditional relationship management systems that depend on users manually entering data, RelateIQ's platform automatically isolated and analyzed professional emails and other interactions, combined them with third-party data, and generated reminders and suggestions. Its emphasis on automated capture, nuanced language analysis and native mobile access was presented as its main point of separation from existing CRM tools (sources 2, 4).

Technology

Large-scale data-mining and machine learning applied to unstructured data. The platform ingested email, voice, social network and calendar data and used natural language processing to interpret the content of communications, surfacing signals about deal progression and forgotten leads. It enriched and deduplicated contact records across address books and blended internal interaction data with external sources such as LinkedIn and Facebook. The March 2014 "Closest Connections" feature algorithmically identified the team member best positioned to make a warm introduction to a new lead (sources 1, 2, 4).

Go-to-market

The company tested its product in stealth for roughly two years before a public launch in June 2013 with approximately 100 clients already onboarded, marketing a self-serve, quickly deployable workflow product with free mobile apps as an on-ramp and per-seat subscription tiers (source 2).

Business teams that manage external relationships — sales, business development and product functions — including startups and small businesses as well as larger enterprises. Early customers at launch included T3 Advisors and WellnessFX (source 2).

Geography

Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, United States (sources 0, 3, 4).

History

Founded in July 2011 in Palo Alto by Adam Evans and Steve Loughlin, the company raised a seed round in 2011 and a $9 million Series A from Accel, Morgenthaler and SV Angel. It emerged from stealth on 12 June 2013 alongside a $20 million Series B co-led by Formation 8 and Accel, bringing total funding to $29 million at a reported $100 million valuation. At the end of July 2013 the company hired data scientist DJ Patil, formerly of LinkedIn and Greylock Partners, as VP of Product, and in mid-2014 hired Twitter's former VP of Search. A further $40 million round closed in March 2014 at a valuation of roughly $250 million, with Redpoint Ventures participating in the Series C. Salesforce.com announced its acquisition of the company on 11 July 2014. RelateIQ was rebranded as SalesforceIQ at the 2015 Dreamforce conference, and the product was retired on 13 March 2020. Several RelateIQ engineers, including VP of Engineering Gary Lerhaupt and software engineers Matt Martin and Mike Grinolds, left Salesforce in 2016 to co-found Clockwise (sources 1, 2, 3, 4, 5).

Risks & controversies

The core product line did not survive long term inside the acquirer: after being renamed SalesforceIQ, it was retired on 13 March 2020, and Wikipedia lists the original company as defunct as of 2014 following the acquisition (source 4).