On Tuesday, the Boston startup community learned that Cambridge’s Driftt, founded by two local tech veterans who recently left HubSpot, has raised $15 million in funding.
Now I’ve got a few more details for you from co-founder David Cancel, a local serial entrepreneur who most recently was chief product officer at Cambridge-based HubSpot.
Cancel tells me that CRV led the $15 million Series A round, contributing $10 million of the total, while General Catalyst Partners invested $4 million.
The remaining $1 million came from two local venture firms and a dozen angel investors. Seven HubSpot execs were among the angels; along with founders Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan, they were CMO Mike Volpe, COO JD Sherman, CFO John Kinzer, general counsel John Kelleher and VP Phil Harrell.
So, clearly no hard feelings in HubSpot's upper ranks about the departure of Cancel and Elias Torres, Cancel's co-founder on Driftt, who before this was VP of engineering at HubSpot.
Among the other angel investors in the round are Visible Measures founder/CEO Brian Shin and Jeff Seibert and Wayne Chang, founders of Cambridge startup Crashlytics and now executives at Twitter, which acquired Crashlytics in 2013. The other venture firms that have backed Driftt are Founder Collective and NextView Ventures.
The Driftt team has been working out of CRV’s office in Cambridge but will be finding its own space this year, Cancel said.
Collaboration tech
As for the problem that Driftt is working to solve, Cancel described it this way: “We want to do for collaboration what Dropbox did for storage, create an application that becomes ubiquitous and a platform over time.”
“We raised $15m vs funding it ourselves or raising a smaller round because we want to create another anchor company in Boston.”
I also asked Cancel why the startup raised a relatively large amount for its initial round (rather than $3 million or $5 million, for instance).
His answer: “We raised $15m vs funding it ourselves or raising a smaller round because we want to create another anchor company in Boston.”
“We lost Facebook and Dropbox to the Bay Area,” Cancel said in an email. “We hope to heal those wounds and help to reverse the curse and prove all the critics wrong—you can create billion-dollar companies that change peoples lives for the better in Boston.”
Cancel and Torres were key to building up HubSpot's engineering team and improving its inbound marketing software, following HubSpot's acquisition of their personalization technology startup, Performable, in 2011 for $20 million. They departed HubSpot last July to work on Driftt, a few months prior to HubSpot's IPO.
Worth noting: CRV had contributed the $3 million in funding raised by Performable in 2010.
I recently included Driftt among the up-and-coming local startups that launched in 2014.
