Three founders who built out one of the bigger startups in risk management are scaling a new company to take on another pain point in the world of work.
SmartSuite‘s platform lets teams collaborate on projects, build automations around that work, and search and access work across larger libraries of data spanning a disparate number of apps.
The company says it’s seen 300% growth in the last year as it quietly racked up 50,000 users from 5,000 businesses, including Apple Bank, Credit One Bank, UCLA, Georgetown University, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Sunday Riley, Lyneer Staffing Solutions, Datawatch, and UC Berkeley. Now, on the back of that growth, SmartSuite is announcing $38 million in funding to expand.
SmartSuite is announcing the $38 million figure for the first time today, but that capital was invested over a few tranches.
Most recently, the startup raised a $13 million Series A round led by Canapi Ventures, with Sorenson Capital and High Alpha participating. Before that, SmartSuite’s founders — husband-wife duo Jon and Tara Darbyshire, along with Peter Novosel — bootstrapped the company with their own money, investing $11 million pre-launch in 2022, and $14 million after that.
The Derbyshires’ previous rodeo was Archer Technologies, a risk management platform that they sold to EMC (now Dell) for $200 million in 2010. Later, Archer was spun out as part of RSA, and finally acquired by Cinven in 2023, in a deal reportedly worth more than $2 billion. Novosel, the third co-founder and CTO of SmartSuite, joined Archer halfway through its life as a startup, and then stayed on for several years with EMC/Dell after the acquisition.
The Derbyshires actually took an early retirement after they sold Archer and moved to Newport Beach, California, from Overland Park, Kansas (where Archer was founded), but they discovered they still had a startup itch to scratch. So they linked up with Novosel and dove back into the world of work to found SmartSuite.
Beyond the money to substantially bootstrap a new business, starting and selling Archer helped the trio in two key ways: They picked up a strong list of en …