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The 'Glassdoor' for software reviews, B2B platform G2 Crowd raises $30m from Accel, LinkedIn

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By Laurie Fullerton, Freelance Writer

May 24, 2017 | 3 min read

Chicago-based B2B review platform G2 Crowd — has announced today the close of a $30m series B funding round, led by Accel with participation from key industry executives, LinkedIn, Pritzker Group Venture Capital and G2 Crowd’s founders.

This recent round brings G2 Crowd’s total funding to over $45m for the business software and services review website that has achieved 300% growth over the past year.

G2 Crowd’s early efforts have helped to define a new industry. This new investment and initiative will help the company to expand on its current work, bringing its resources to new areas of the business marketplace and creating more transparency to the business solutions buying process.

Known as the 'Glassdoor' of software reviews, G2 Crowd will use the new funds to accelerate the build out of its review platform across B2B categories and to accelerate G2 Crowd’s expansion into the services sector, including hiring 500 new employees over the next twp years at its Chicago-based headquarters.

“There is a paradigm shift occurring as B2B buyers increasingly behave like consumers, relying on authentic online reviews and social media to make purchase decisions. There is no other company better suited to catalyze this market opportunity than G2 Crowd,” said Accel Partner, Arun Mathew. “Accel has a long history of investing in market leading companies like Facebook, Dropbox, Slack, and Atlassian, and G2 Crowd is no exception. The company’s growth and customer buy in from tech innovators lends an influential voice to the industry.”

This marks only the third time LinkedIn has invested in other companies. Going forward, G2 Crowd will require users to register themselves via their LinkedIn profiles in order to authenticate themselves and to help control against nefarious reviews of software from competitors and trolls. LinkedIn, in turn, will cross-post those reviews to users’ profiles as it bids to become the go-to place to manage and cultivate a public, professional persona.

To date, G2 Crowd has amassed more than 170,000 verified user reviews of business software and solutions, which are freely available to nearly one million site visitors each month.

Further, over 230,000 business professionals have signed up to share their expertise and write reviews or participate in the conversation. The site includes more than 25,000 products in more than 800 business solution categories. The 2016 fiscal year saw more than 300% growth for the company as over 800 technology leaders including Salesforce, Marketo and IBM who have signed on to leverage G2 Crowd’s unique user generated content in their own marketing programs.

“B2B buyers are increasingly looking for real time insights from peers, and we see an incredible opportunity to double down on our innovation and review collation to provide unique buying insights across a broad range of business technology and related services,” said Tim Handorf, co-founder and CEO of G2 Crowd. “Our team will remain committed to focusing on putting the buyer first by delivering the highest level of trust and transparency for business buyers.”

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