Welcoming SocialPandas

We are pleased to announce our lead investment in next-generation SaaS company SocialPandas and welcome Co-Founders Mark Trang, Gretchen DeKnikker and Jason Ouelette to the True Ventures family.

SocialPandas is creating a “social selling” application that will help sales professionals discover new leads, engage top prospects and optimize deal pipelines across social channels. With deep backgrounds in SaaS and CRM, the SocialPandas team has recognized an industry ripe for disruption, and is creating a completely new tool for enterprise companies to compete in the social era.

The advent of social has created an entirely new way of communicating that has impacted nearly every aspect of our lives—not just how we meet and talk to each other, but also how we do business. While B2B marketing has been stuck in email and automation, millions of buying signals and relationship opportunities are occurring across social channels like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. As communication moves well beyond email and phone to encompass these social networks, the idea of customer relationship management must also evolve. Beyond simply capturing “likes,” “followers” and “fans,” SocialPandas aims to convert social engagement into actionable leads for B2B companies—integrating them with existing CRM systems like Salesforce.com.

As B2B becomes more social, salespeople will need new technologies to connect with and close customers, and SocialPandas is bringing this new generation of enterprise software to B2B. Mark and his team not only have a vision for the future of social CRM, but they also have the expertise and deep industry knowledge to execute it. We couldn’t be happier to lead SocialPanda’s seed round, and look forward to watching their brilliant product bring selling into the social era.

Mark, Gretchen and Jason, welcome to the True family!

Read more about SocialPandas in TechCrunch and VentureWire.