Today, we are proud to announce Norwest is leading Propel’s $18 million Series B funding round. The investment builds on the company’s previous $10 million Series A fundraise and brings Propel’s total capital raised to $28 million. Other investors, including Cloud Apps Capital Partners, Salesforce Ventures, and Signalfire, also participated in this round of funding. The new investment will be used to grow the Propel team and build on the company’s existing customer base, including such leaders as Desktop Metal, Samsara, and Peak Design. I’m also excited to be joining Propel’s board.
Many of today’s fastest-growing brands are using Propel to quickly get their latest products into the hands of their customers. The company’s integrated solution centralizes all types of product information—all the way from concept to customer—by weaving together a variety of interrelated yet previously siloed tasks that designers, engineers, marketing, and sales professionals face at all stages of the product lifecycle.
Industry Veteran Focused on Transforming Product Lifecycle Management
Propel was founded by Ray Hein, who brings 20 years of expertise and leadership experience from previous positions at industry-leading companies like Agile Software, Apttus, Vendavo, and Centric Software. At Propel, Hein has built a strong leadership team which includes Brian Sohmers, former general manager and EVP of Equilar, and Ron Hess, a former Salesforce architect and evangelist.
Ray and his team noticed that most Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) vendors focused on helping manufacturers design hardware and handoff changes to manufacturing, while Product Information Management (PIM) vendors only focused on keeping product catalogs up to date. They realized that there was still a huge gap translating product updates into customer adoption and market success. And that’s why they founded Propel.
Propel’s mission is the help build tomorrow’s best brands by helping them get their products to market quicker than ever before. With the Propel solution in place, stakeholders—including end customers—are able to work together in parallel on product decisions, with rapid iterations.
Why We’re Bullish on Propel
Product innovation, development, and adoption are accelerating quickly in today’s digital economy. That’s why digital transformation initiatives are top of mind for most enterprises today, with 58% of global services decision-makers saying they were in the midst of a digital transformation in 2017, according to Forrester Research.
This wave of data integration is also energizing innovation in product and service delivery. For example, one Propel customer has been able to scale its company 3X and boost innovation with quickly iterative product features. This is just one example of what Propel’s cloud-based technology can do.
Looking ahead, we’re bullish about Propel because of its great leadership team and the way the team has reimagined PLM with the cloud.
