Cirrus Insight secures significant growth equity investment
By Tom Ballard, Chief Alliance Officer, PYA
One of the local start-ups we spotlighted in the first year (2012) of teknovation.biz just had a major announcement yesterday.
Cirrus Insight, a bi-coastal company co-founded by Brandon Bruce, has received a significant growth equity investment from Clovis Point Capital LLC, a Houston-based firm. According to yesterday’s announcement, the capital infusion “will propel Cirrus Insight by enabling the company to accelerate innovation and growth while underscoring Cirrus Insight’s continued commitment to customer success.”
It’s the second significant announcement recently from a local start-up involving a major investment. In July, Prisma Renewable Composites announced that Domtar Corporation had acquired a majority interest in the Knoxville start-up (see that teknovation.biz article here.)
Cirrus Insight, a leading provider of sales enablement software, was founded by Bruce and Ryan Huff who were college classmates at the University of California Santa Barbara. The latter has served as the company’s Chief Executive Officer while Bruce serves as its Chief Operating Officer.
Cirrus Insight has its engineering operations in Irvine, CA and its marketing, sales and support team in Knoxville. Initially, the company was located in Maryville before moving to West Knoxville. Earlier this year, it relocated to the first floor of the former Tombras Group Building on Concord Street.
“This milestone is a testament to the hard work of our talented team,” Bruce said in yesterday’s news release. “Over the past seven years, we’ve partnered with thousands of organizations to transform how hundreds of thousands of sales people work every day. We look forward to continuing that important work with the team at Clovis Point.”
About 250,000 professionals use Cirrus Insight to increase productivity in Gmail and Outlook including Fortune 500 companies and freelancers who use it for email tracking, email templates, drip campaigns, follow-up reminders, meeting scheduling, and world-class Salesforce integration. Cirrus Insight has been on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies for three consecutive years.
Clovis Point is a lower middle-market private equity fund focused on making both investments in enterprise software and technology-enabled business services companies. Clovis Point is a relationship-based investor, utilizing its experience and expertise to help companies realize their full potential.
As Bruce has grown Cirrus Insights’ presence locally, he has played an increasingly important role in the regional entrepreneurial ecosystem. Bruce led the effort in 2017 to break the Guinness Book of World Records for the most people learning to code at the same time. He’s been one of the founders of the “100 Men Who Care – Knoxville” initiative, now serves as President of the Knoxville Chapter of the Entrepreneurs Organization, and has been a co-stage host for the past several “Startup Day Knoxville” events including yesterday.
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