Accel’s Seed in Scratchpad, the First Workspace for Revenue Teams

Sales has never been an easy gig. And the COVID-19 pandemic certainly hasn’t helped, given the rollercoaster effect it’s had on B2B software spending throughout the past year. According to a report from TrustRadius, close to half (49%) of buyers decreased their tech spend in 2020. But things may be looking up, as the same report noted that 56% predicted that spend will either return to previous levels or increase in 2021.

Revenue teams should be ready to bounce back and take advantage of these new opportunities, but many are bogged down by painful bottlenecks in their workflow. This is because sales teams are often forced to collaborate within docs, sheets, and apps—all of which are disconnected from their CRM system, leading to incomplete or missing sales data. 

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After observing the challenges that salespeople were experiencing in their day-to-day workflows, co-founders Pouyan Salehi and Cyrus Karbassiyoon created Scratchpad to serve as the first fully integrated workspace for revenue teams. In addition to tackling the pervasive problem of administrative work, their platform is seamless to use: it takes less than 30 seconds to set-up and instantly connects to Salesforce to gives sales reps a fast and modern interface to interact with their sales data and workflows, eliminating the need for endless browser tabs and copying and pasting sales notes into slow-loading CRM systems. By removing the non-revenue generating activities associated with sales, Scratchpad empowers sales teams to focus on what they’re best at—selling—so that they can operate at their full potential.

As a former CEO and founder, I was personally struck by what Pouyan and Cyrus are solving with Scratchpad: years earlier, my own sales team was caught in the same frustrating and disjointed cycle. The fact that it still went unaddressed today was core to the reason why we led Scratchpad’s seed investment just a few short months ago. We’re thrilled to count the Scratchpad team as part of our #AccelFamily and congratulate them on their Series A milestone today.

—Steve Loughlin