Our investment in Freckle was serendipitous. I stumbled upon the product as a user trying to answer a simple question: which of our 100+portfolio founders had previously worked at Rippling?
I’d heard of tools like Clay, but 30 minutes into using the product had gotten stuck, unable to figure out the correct prompts to answer my question. Frustrated, I then stumbled upon Freckle, a company I’d vaguely heard about a few months earlier. I uploaded the list of founder names to Freckle and simply asked the question in English: “CEO or CTO previously worked at Rippling?.” Minutes later, I had my answer.
A snippet from said Freckle table
This magical experience made an impression. I began creating more Freckle tables and began thinking up more use cases for it. I used it to enrich our list of founder names with other details - like emails, Linkedin profiles and company descriptions. I used it to help one of our portfolio companies find more lookalike customers to sell to. This led to more back and forth with Freckle’s CEO Nathan Merzvinskis, who patiently answered all my questions (often with a helpful Loom video showing how he’d already solved it in Freckle). Nathan is a second-time founder who built Freckle to solve his own problem. His product instincts are top notch and in every conversation, it was clear how attuned he was to customer needs.
Typically as a seed investor, when you have strong positive feelings on a founder and product you are leaning in. And I was too, but part of me had some skepticism about the broader sales enablement category. It’s a huge $10B+ market but it’s also a noisy space, with a lot of overlapping companies and similar sounding value propositions. But the more I used Freckle and interacted with Nathan, the more I became convinced the company had a chance to cut through the noise. It’s simple yet powerful product just got the job done without any real learning curve required. I could imagine a future where Freckle powered data enrichment and outbound for all (non-technical) business people - think marketers, AEs, SDRs and more. Every website visitor could be auto-enriched and sent a personalized email, every new website signup could be auto-researched and assigned a lead score, and every email and phone number could be verified before kickstarting an outbound campaign. Product simplicity opens up use cases that are limited only by imagination.
In just a year since launching, more than 2,500 companies (including several 1984.vc portfolio companies) are happily using Freckle to enrich their CRM. Freckle syncs with your CRM and allows you to update it with email addresses, phone numbers, Linkedin URLS, company descriptions - and over 40 other data types. And it takes just minutes to get set up without the need for any experts or agencies.
That’s why today I’m thrilled to announce that we at 1984 Ventures have co-led Freckle’s $4M seed round alongside the team at Gradient Ventures. We believe Freckle has the potential to radically simplify data enrichment and outbound flows for the masses, making tasks as easy as telling the AI what to do (”add the emails and Linkedin profiles of all visitors to my website, push that to Hubspot and then send them a personalized email”).
If you haven’t tried Freckle yet, sign up here and get 1,000 free credits this week. You can have cleaner, enriched CRM data before your next coffee break.