Drew Sechrist, who was employee 36 at Salesforce in 1999, was on Marc Benioff’s early sales team, pushing the company when nobody knew who they were or what hosted software was, for that matter. He recognized early on that having connections helped drive sales. He called Benioff the “number one alpha networker.” Sechrist wanted to build a better way to do that. Today, Connect the Dots has a social graph in beta by request, or, if you know someone using it, you can also get on, using the Clubhouse approach to user-base building.
The company used a $5 million seed round to build the product and recently closed a $15 million round led by Norwest Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors Cloud Apps Capital Partners and Velvet Sea Ventures. Connect the Dots has now raised a total of $20 million.
The company currently has 55 employees with a home base in San Francisco, though employees are spread out, with a big engineering team in Serbia. Sechrist is living in Miami at the moment. He plans to double the team in the next year with the new capital.