Bringing Intelligence to B2B Purchasing - Why IVP Invested in G2 Crowd

By Jules Maltz, Alex Lim, and Jake Storm

IVP is proud to announce a Series C investment in G2 Crowd, the world's leading marketplace for business software and services. For too long, business product purchases have been frustrating - numerous calls with salespeople, opaque pricing data, limited reviews, and the inability to easily compare alternative solutions. You can find lots of information online to buy a condo, take a vacation, or book a dinner reservation, but how do you know which products are right for your business? The answer is G2 Crowd.

With over 500,000 peer reviews, G2 Crowd brings authenticity and transparency to B2B technology purchasing, giving buyers the confidence they need to select the best technology solutions, uniquely tailored to them. We've been using G2 Crowd at IVP to help us identify and invest in the fastest-growing, later-stage enterprise companies, and we're now excited to partner with the exceptional team at G2 Crowd to change business product purchasing.

Here's the G2 on why we invested:

One Massive Market

The market for global IT spend is enormous and is expected to reach over $3.7 trillion in 2018. If global IT spending were a single country (albeit a pretty strange country!), it would be the 5th largest economy in the world. Out of the total IT market, companies spend about $1.4 trillion on enterprise software and services. While the market is massive, it's inefficient. In the US and the UK, over $34 billion is wasted each year on shelfware, essentially unused or underused software. Because of the lack of transparency in IT purchasing, many businesses buy products and services that aren't right for them. As the source of truth for product information, competitive reports, and verified-user reviews, G2 Crowd is the place to discover and buy the best business commerce products. Just as Zillow, and TripAdvisor help consumers make expensive and complex purchases, G2 Crowd is the trusted place to find ideal technology solutions for your business.

Businesses are Consumers Too

One of IVP's core investment themes is the consumerization of the enterprise. Business technology spend is shifting away from the CIO or IT department to business professionals directly. Just as knowledge workers demand using consumer products like iPhones at work, they also want consumer-like software and IT experiences that are well-designed, seamless, and productive. IVP has backed numerous companies that provide delightful, consumer-like software including Dropbox, Slack, Domo, Looker, Marketo and Amplitude. Instead of IT departments initiating a search for products, business line managers and teams often drive product purchasing. This shift in purchasing has resulted in the massive proliferation of business technology throughout companies. In fact, the average enterprise now runs over 1,200 cloud apps or services concurrently. To find the best technology, you can no longer rely on your IT department to consult with outdated industry research analysts. You need to do your own research, and that's where G2 Crowd helps. What Amazon is for consumers, G2 Crowd is for knowledge workers - helping over 23 million business buyers discover unbiased information on over 58,500 products across 1,200 categories.

Three-Peat Founders

One of the best parts of venture is getting to work more than once with entrepreneurs you love and respect. Three years ago, we partnered with Godard Abel and team as they built Steelbrick, a sales acceleration software provider later purchased by Salesforce. We saw firsthand the dedication, passion, execution, and heart that resulted in a fantastic outcome. When we had the chance to work with the same team again going after an even bigger market, we jumped at the opportunity. Although it's the second time we've backed Godard and team, it's the third company for many of the founders, beginning with Big Machines in 2000. We're thrilled to work with Godard, Matt, Tim, Mark, Mike and fantastic co-investors including Accel, Emergence, and Pritzker to hopefully make this the biggest one of all.

Jules Maltz, Alex Lim, and Jake Storm are Investors at IVP, a later-stage venture capital firm.

LINK:	https://www.ivp.com/news/blog/bringing-intelligence-to-b2b-purchasing-...
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