![](\"https:\/\/tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com\/2017\/05\/g2-crowd.jpg?w=738\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
In the age\u00a0of social media, you\u2019re only as good\u00a0as your last like, and today a startup has raised a sizeable round of funding \u2014 banking\u00a0that the same maxim applies\u00a0to software, too.\u00a0G2 Crowd<\/a> \u2014 a Chicago-based company that has built a platform for\u00a0crowdsourcing enterprise software reviews to help others make decisions on what to use and buy \u2014 is today announcing that it has raised $30 million in funding at an undisclosed valuation, bringing the total raised to over $45 million.<\/p>\n The Series B round was led by Accel, with\u00a0participation from Pritzker Group Venture Capital; G2 Crowd\u2019s founders\u00a0Tim Handorf, Mark Myers, Matt Gorniak, Mike Wheeler and Godard Abel (who founded BigMachines previously and sold it to Oracle for $400 million). And, perhaps most uniquely, LinkedIn<\/a>,\u00a0the social network for professionals acquired\u00a0by Microsoft<\/a> for $26.2 billion last year.<\/p>\n LinkedIn typically doesn\u2019t invest in other companies \u2014 this actually appears to only be the third<\/a>\u00a0time it\u2019s done so \u2014 and in this case Handorf, who is the CEO, tells me it\u2019s because the two work closely together and may well do more in the future.<\/p>\n One of the most obvious places where it\u2019s partnering now is in logins: G2 Crowd requires users to register themselves via their LinkedIn profiles in order to authenticate themselves and to help control against nefarious reviews of software from competitors and trolls. LinkedIn, in turn,\u00a0cross-posts those reviews to users\u2019 profiles, as part of its bigger bid to become the go-to place to manage and cultivate your public, professional persona.<\/p>\n \u201cG2 Crowd is a highly\u00a0respected\u00a0company\u00a0with great insights into the B2B environment,\u201d a spokesperson said. \u201cWe occasionally invest in\u00a0companies\u00a0that\u00a0can inform our long-term business strategy, and in this case, we believe\u00a0G2\u00a0Crowd can help us better understand and address the needs of our customers.\u201d Handorf declined to comment on whether the investment was part of an attempted acquisition but noted that the company has been approached by others in recent times.<\/p>\n G2 Crowd is part of a large group of companies that have sprung up online that provide reviews and competitive analysis about various software products. However, most of these, Handorf points out, are based around affiliate revenue models, where the sites\u00a0make money whenever users click on the links of the companies listed in their competitive lists.<\/p>\n Instead, he likens G2\u2019s business model\u00a0more to that of Glassdoor\u2019s, the company review\u00a0platform: \u201cWe don\u2019t have advertising or give preference to companies who pay us,\u201d he noted, \u201cand we don\u2019t do lead generation.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Companies, as on Glassdoor, get free profiles and they can claim them to add in more information about what they do, downloads and so on. The other area where G2 Crowd is hoping to build out its business is in areas of analytics and research \u2014 competing against the likes of Forrester, Gartner and IDC for profiles and sector analysis \u2014 and also into other adjacent areas of products that businesses might need to buy, be it consulting or integration services, or perhaps even who the best company is to cater an event.<\/span><\/p>\n So far the formula has been working. Last year, there were 75,000 reviews posted on the site \u2014 triple the number from the year before, and this year G2 Crowd projects 225,000 reviews posted on the site.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Another area where G2 is quite compatible with LinkedIn is that both companies tend to have very strong SEO, meaning its results score highly on Google when you are looking things up (in the case of LinkedIn, people like \u201cIngrid Lunden\u201d; and in the case of G2, things like \u201cLinkedIn competitors.\u201d)<\/p>\n This is a blessing and a curse: a blessing in that it brings a lot of visibility to the company\u2019s services and potentially that will help feed in more reviews. A curse because that leaves G2 Crowd somewhat at the mercy of Google, its algorithms and its longer-term ambitions of what it might want to do in various specific areas of vertical search.<\/p>\n For now, G2 Crowd continues to grow and meet the demands of a new landscape in the business world, where we collaborate and communicate as a matter of course.<\/p>\n \u201cThere 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,\u201d said Accel Partner, Arun Mathew, in a statement. \u00a0\u201cAccel has a long history of investing in market leading companies like Facebook, Dropbox, Slack, and Atlassian, and G2 Crowd is no exception. The company\u2019s rapid growth and customer buy-in from leading tech innovators lends an extremely influential voice to the industry.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"\"](\"https:\/\/tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com\/2017\/05\/g2-crowd.jpg?w=680\")
In the age\u00a0of social media, you’re only as good\u00a0as your last like, and today a startup has raised a sizeable round of funding — banking\u00a0that the same maxim applies\u00a0to software, too.\u00a0G2 Crowd — a Chicago-based company that has built a platform for\u00a0crowdsourcing enterprise software reviews to help others make decisions on what to use and buy — is today announcing… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n\n<\/img><\/a>
<\/img><\/a>
<\/img><\/a>
<\/img><\/a>
<\/img><\/a>
<\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5817,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[59,66,26],"class_list":["post-341832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-media","tag-techcrunch","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5817"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341832\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}