Method, a Toronto-based CRM solution, today announced the closing of a $3 million dollar investment round led by Klass Capital. The company, which is the number-one rated such app for Intuit’s QuickBooks platform, will be using the cash injection to help it jumpstart a platform redesign, and the development of integrations with other leading bookkeeping software like Wave, Xero, FreshBooks and Intaact.
The startup already numbers its users in the thousands in the U.S., and also hopes to aggressively expand into South America, Europe and Asia with the help of the funding, thanks to an increase in hiring across all functions. The team has recently grown to 25 to help satisfy increasing demand, according to CEO and founder Paul Jackson. Demand is on the rise because Method offers a specific take on CRM that appeals to SMBs who don’t want to worry about learning new systems as their needs change, or bringing on heavyweight in-house tech expertise.
“What we do is we allow non-developers to create and customize apps using drag-and-drop building blocks rather than code,” Jackson explained in an interview. “So if you think of a small business, rather than layering on another app on top of their many apps to solve problems, they can just customize an existing screen or an existing process in their existing CRM. We feel this allows them to be more agile and more efficient, since we allow them to have a system that adapts to them.”
While Method has been around for a few years, this marks the first time the company has taken on investment from an outside source. Jackson said that in order to pursue the company’s goals at the pace he wanted, it made sense to go after outside funding. The company is gearing up for a number of major new product releases in the near future, including app and product launches during the first half of 2013.
“We have a really early-stage mobile presence, but on the new platform, the first iteration of the new platform will be mobile,” Jackson said of the company’s upcoming plans. “So it’s a native app, with HTML5 inside of the wrapper for the parts that customers can customize. We’re gearing up for a major launch in the summer, and we’ll be releasing new features bit-by-bit before then, with the first big bit being the mobile piece in April.”
Method’s customizable approach is innovative, but seeing how well it translates to mobile could be a key indicator of the company’s future success. This funding should help make sure the company has the proper expertise and resources to build an effective mobile offering for the long-term.
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