imgres-11Handshakez announced Wednesday that it has closed $3.6 million in venture capital financing.
Austin Ventures led the Series A round along with with First Round Capital, FLOODGATE, CrunchFund, Valhalla Partners and Thinktiv.
The Austin-based startup is “led by Jason Wesbecher, previously VP of Strategic Accounts at Jive Software; Scott Brittain, previously VP Engineering at Solarwinds; and Michael Osborne, previously Chief Revenue Officer at Bazaarvoice,” according to a news release
Handshakez has 50 customers on its customer relationship collaboration and analytics platform.
“The act of shaking hands is as old as commerce itself — and signals engagement, trust and balance between two people,” Handshakez co-founder and CEO Jason Wesbecher said in a news release. “This engagement has been under enormous strain in the last two decades by CRM technologies that have not kept up with the needs of the modern customer. The term CRM itself is wildly out of touch: customers don’t want to be managed, they want to be engaged. Handshakez is solving this today by humanizing and simplifying front end processes to put the customer at the center of the relationship.”
“There is a tremendous opportunity to take customer relationships out of email and bring new levels of collaboration to an age old sales process,” Thomas Ball, General Partner at Austin Ventures, said in a news release. “Successful enterprise companies like Jive and Yammer have proven that engagement, not record keeping, is the future. Handshakez has what it takes to build an industry-leading company in this space: seasoned leadership, an insider’s understanding of the market, and the vision to re-shape front-end enterprise applications around the customer.”