Three founders who built out one of the bigger startups in risk management are scaling a new company to take on another pain point in the world of work.
SmartSuite‘s platform lets teams collaborate on projects, build automations around that work, and search and access work across larger libraries of data spanning a disparate number of apps.
The company says it’s seen 300% growth in the last year as it quietly racked up 50,000 users from 5,000 businesses, including Apple Bank, Credit One Bank, UCLA, Georgetown University, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Sunday Riley, Lyneer Staffing Solutions, Datawatch, and UC Berkeley. Now, on the back of that growth, SmartSuite is announcing $38 million in funding to expand.
SmartSuite is announcing the $38 million figure for the first time today, but that capital was invested over a few tranches.
Most recently, the startup raised a $13 million Series A round led by Canapi Ventures, with Sorenson Capital and High Alpha participating. Before that, SmartSuite’s founders — husband-wife duo Jon and Tara Darbyshire, along with Peter Novosel — bootstrapped the company with their own money, investing $11 million pre-launch in 2022, and $14 million after that.
The Derbyshires’ previous rodeo was Archer Technologies, a risk management platform that they sold to EMC (now Dell) for $200 million in 2010. Later, Archer was spun out as part of RSA, and finally acquired by Cinven in 2023, in a deal reportedly worth more than $2 billion. Novosel, the third co-founder and CTO of SmartSuite, joined Archer halfway through its life as a startup, and then stayed on for several years with EMC/Dell after the acquisition.
The Derbyshires actually took an early retirement after they sold Archer and moved to Newport Beach, California, from Overland Park, Kansas (where Archer was founded), but they discovered they still had a startup itch to scratch. So they linked up with Novosel and dove back into the world of work to found SmartSuite.
Beyond the money to substantially bootstrap a new business, starting and selling Archer helped the trio in two key ways: They picked up a strong list of enterprise contacts, and they had an idea for a product those enterprises needed.
As Jon Darbyshire, the CEO of SmartSuite, explains it, in the course of building and operating Archer’s risk platform, he and his team got an insight into the shortcomings of software and cloud services, and how they worked together.
Tools to manage how people work across apps have been around for a while, but Darbyshire found that end users often took a fragmented approach to using them.
“Customers have [for example] different tools for sales, marketing, HR, and operations. And then they were using products like Zapier to build integrations between these tools,” he said. “It was just a constant headache, having to put all the data from your business in one core location.”
SmartSuite brings three software use cases together, he said.
“Think of the traditional project management tools like Monday or Asana. Those are very good for projects and tasks, but not everything in a business is a task,” he said, citing CRM, which may not be “task” or project-based work.
Other tools like Slack aim to bring together people’s discussions around work with the work they do, but such tools leave a lot to be desired: A chat-led app can be extremely noisy and make it hard to follow threads of conversation.
“The second piece is more process management, tools like ServiceNow. And then the third category is document management. Think of Notion, Google Docs, or Microsoft Loop. So we bring those three core capabilities together into one platform.”
SmartSuite aims to be a platform where a person or team “would be able to manage any process.”
To onboard customers more easily, SmartSuite has built some 200 different templates for common workflows. The startup says it supports integrations with about 5,000 applications that bring in a lot of the would-be competitive alternatives, such as Slack, Microsoft, Google, HubSpot, Salesforce, Jira, Make and Zapier. The aim here is to enable more overarching application access while letting employees use existing solutions if they choose to.
The fact that SmartSuite can be used alongside the very tools it’s aiming to replace could be one argument against adopting it: Why add yet more software if you don’t absolutely need to?
The answer might lie in which kind of headache an IT or compliance team chooses to face down the road.
Walker Forehand, president and general partner of Canapi Ventures, highlighted the platform’s ability to remove “complexity from inherently complex processes such as Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC), for enterprises and financial institutions.” SmartSuite already counts a number of banks among its customers. Canapi is a fintech specialist with more than 70 banks supporting it through the Canapi Alliance, so it’s a fair bet that financial services businesses are among the companies looking to simplify observability around how all that software works together.
Darbyshire said that customers have been using SmartSuite in different ways. Some run all of their software and work through it, while others manage specific work loads — for example cybersecurity, risk and compliance, or recruiting and staffing. SmartSuite uses AWS as its cloud provider “as a closed-loop system” for all documents and other work run on its platform.
Some of the new funding will be used for recruitment. Interestingly, all of the startup’s traction to date has been achieved without a single marketing hire. “All the growth has been viral, mostly through YouTube video content created by our partners,” he said, adding that there are about 600 videos covering different integrations and uses. The startup is now hiring a more formal marketing team.
