Building the Partner Ecosystem Platform: Our Investment in Crossbeam

By: Logan Bartlett and Tyler Flint

Partnerships are a critical component of the B2B sales world. From the Fortune 500 to startups and SMEs, it’s estimated that up to 50% of B2B organizations rely on partner-influenced sales to drive meaningful revenue.¹ Building, managing, and maximizing the value of these partner ecosystems has historically been a highly manual process. Without a dedicated collaboration platform, partnership and channel executives have relied on tedious human-centric work, manual spreadsheets, and mutual trust to identify opportunities for collaboration within their own partner network. That’s where Crossbeam comes in.

Crossbeam increases partner sales success

Crossbeam is on a mission to revolutionize the world of business partnerships. Its collaborative intelligence platform allows B2B companies to securely share their data to strengthen alliances, enable go-to-market teams, and better serve their customers. Crossbeam takes the grunt work out of managing partner ecosystems, freeing up teams to spend more time scaling the success of their programs and less time in spreadsheets.

The Crossbeam platform acts as an escrow service for customer account data, allowing companies to automate the search for overlapping customers and prospects with their partners, while keeping the rest of their data private and secure. Partners can increase their sales success by better coordinating go-to-market strategies, streamlining workflows, comparing shared customers, and surfacing new opportunities on Crossbeam’s modern automated partner platform.

It started with the right team and a vision

Two years ago, Crossbeam co-founders Bob (Robert J. Moore) and Buck Ryan asked a simple question: How could they improve intercompany collaboration? Bob’s experience co-founding and running both RJMetrics and Stitch, combined with Buck’s experience as an engineering leader, afforded them an inside view into the trends and forces that drove explosive growth of modern partner ecosystems. Cloud data pipelines and warehousing were making data sets more portable and standardized, while digital transformation efforts were bringing even the largest enterprises — and their data — into these cloud platforms.

Bob and Buck saw an opportunity to create something new: A data layer made up of the intersections between companies and their partner ecosystems, catalyzed by a platform for turning that data into business value. Just 18 months after launching Crossbeam in January 2019, the Crossbeam network has grown exponentially to more than 950 companies and counting.

Our partnership with Crossbeam

We are pleased to announce that Redpoint has led Crossbeam’s $25M Series B. It’s an honor to partner with Crossbeam as they accelerate their mission to build and deliver a category-defining platform that changes the way companies collaborate with each other, and we are thrilled to join existing investors FirstMark Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Slack Fund, and Uncork Capital on this journey.

At Redpoint, we love working with founders, entrepreneurs, and teams that can connect the dots across their unique backgrounds to imagine something bold and new. Bob, Buck, and the Crossbeam team are relentless in their drive to create the default SaaS platform for modern partner ecosystems. Just today, Crossbeam announced the launch of a new free tier, allowing companies to use the entire platform — including access to thousands of overlapping data points with their partners — for free. They also announced the launch of Partnerbase, a free public data set that maps the partner ecosystems of thousands of B2B companies. These announcements are the embodiment of Crossbeam’s core value to “Grow the Network.” Expect much more soon!

¹ Forrester Consulting, April 2018