Craft Ventures

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is one of those acronyms that is thrown around all the time. The annoying part? It means 100 different things to 100 different companies based on their motion type — let’s dig in. I love supporting our portfolio here at Craft Ventures on ABM for every motion type: Product-Led Growth (PLG), Product-Led Sales (PLS) and Sales-Led Growth (SLG). The most fun component is refining all the playbooks we used at ClickUp around a mix of PLG and sales-led ABM strategies, with world-class PLS and SLG businesses. I joined?Ron Dawson?from?HubSpot For Startups?and?Ruby James?from?LinkedIn?to discuss account-based marketing (ABM) strategies for startups, from Seed-stage to Series C and beyond. Here's 8 quick takeaways (below) for all my founders, marketing / growth / GTM leaders and teams out there. ________________________ - How ABM worked at ClickUp: ABM helped organize inbound PLG leads and align them with the sales motion, showcasing the flexibility of ABM. - The simple definition of ABM (for anyone): Selecting high-value accounts and creating tailored strategies to engage and convert. - Marketing's job vs. Sales' job: Marketing creates awareness with targeted content, while sales personalizes outreach and deepens relationships. - Get S&M on the same page: Sales and marketing must agree on the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and strategy to drive effective collaboration. - Avoid this for unsuccessful ABM: Many startups struggle with unclear ICPs, insufficient foundational content, and the long-term commitment ABM requires. - Your quick checklist for successful ABM: Prioritize ICP definition, create industry-specific content, and leverage intent data to engage prospects at the right time. - What's happening in ABM for early-stage companies: ABM adoption has surged, with over 90% of Seed and Series A stage startups using it to cut through noise. - Don't forget this in ABM: ABM requires trust-building, patience for long sales cycles, and consistent messaging to keep prospects engaged over time. ________________________ Want to check out the conversation in-depth? You can watch it here: https://lnkd.in/gWpxcDEq Stay tuned for Pt. 2 next week, where we’ll dive into the effective use of LinkedIn for winning in marketing and ABM for all B2B GTM motion types.

The software we use everyday doesn't leverage the power of sight. But it will soon. Roboflow has raised an additional $40M to further grow open source and enterprise visual AI. Delivering on the promise of computer vision and visual AI is bigger than any one co. Open source packages we maintain with the community see millions of downloads. Roboflow Universe supports 500M+ user created and shared images across 150k+ models. The hosted platform has delivered 1M hours of GPU training to open source projects. We remain committed to being the starting point for those tinkering, creating, and scaling up your computer vision projects from dataset to model to deployment (and, increasingly, in reverse order). We've also seen rapid adoption from 25,000 organizations, including some of the world's largest Fortune 100 companies, operating at worldwide scale. Roboflow's solutions keep trains on the tracks, ensure your packages show up on time, and provide the building materials for your homes. 40% of global GDP (!) is wrapped up in these operationally intensive, real world businesses, and they're seeing millions in ROI partnering with Roboflow. We'd love to build with you.

?? Thrilled to announce our $12M Series A led by Benchmark and Sarah Tavel to accelerate Agentio’s mission to transform the future of advertising! ?? Since launching the Agentio ad platform last October, we’ve empowered leading performance marketing teams to scale YouTube creator ad programs as easily as other digital channels. By automating the hardest parts of working with creators—opacity, friction, decentralization, and lengthy negotiations—we’re unlocking a $600B+ paid media budget pool for authentic storytelling. This shift allows brands to invest in creators at scale for the first time, enabling them to authentically represent their stories and values. We believe creators are the future of advertising—not more banner ads, not skippable video ads, but real, meaningful, creator content that audiences love. Until now, this future hasn’t been scalable. Agentio is changing that. Our growth has been explosive, with many of the world's best advertisers and creators alike seeing tremendous value and ROAS from our platform. This journey wouldn’t be possible without our talented, world-class team and my incredible co-founder and CTO, Jonathan Meyers. To our amazing brand and creator partners, and to Benchmark , Craft Ventures, AlleyCorp, and so many others who share our vision—thank you for believing in our ambitious vision. If you’re a marketer looking to unlock a highly-performant ad channel, let’s connect! If you’re ready to help build a generational company in NYC, check out our 7 open roles—we’d love to have you on this journey: https://lnkd.in/ez2zhyrT This is just the beginning. Onward! ?? Congrats, team! I'm so lucky to get to set a higher bar with you, each and every day. Johanna Martens, Kevin Shieh, Abbie Sheppard, Hilary Anne Hyman, Sam Schiff, Alec S., Anna Haywood, John Schlachtenhaufen, Saumya Grover, Leona Lu, Steven Laake, Dan Tucker, Guillermo Echarte https://lnkd.in/eu8gUfb5

We're excited to back Endeavor on their mission to leverage AI to revitalize American manufacturing. More from Jeff Fluhr and Brian Murray on why we invested: https://lnkd.in/ghiQftnN

Last night William Harmer, CISSP, CISM, CIPP, Zao Chen and I had the pleasure of spending the evening with members of Craft Ventures's CISO & CXO Advisory Council for an intimate dinner filled with interesting conversations and sharing. Thank you for being there and for your engagement Chet M., Du?an Vuksanovic, Geeta Pyne, Jonathan Chan and Parag Shrivastava & Rinki Sethi.

Calculating your core #SaaS metrics have already been standardized by SaaSGrid. Today, they launched a new suite of tools to track sales pipeline metrics. Analyzing sales pipeline is vital for forecasting future growth and learning where your product and GTM process needs to improve. Check out the new blog post by David O. Sacks & Ethan Ruby: The Pipeline Metrics that Matter.

Big day for OpenPhone as they officially launch an API -- and live up to their name by truly being "open"! Starting today, OpenPhone can be fully customized and integrated into any business’s tech stack, whether it’s an SMB, VC-backed startup, or mom & pop shop. The story behind this launch has an interesting twist... We typically hear about fast-growth tech startups driving innovation and pushing for APIs, but in OpenPhone's case, this release was influenced by the next-gen SMB customers they work with. These companies think of themselves as “startups” but aren’t the high-tech, VC-backed companies traditionally associated with that term. This launch was driven by Main Street businesses that have have a mature tech stack, are tapped into AI, use Zapier, and need more customizability and automation to operate efficiently.?And that includes their communication tools. Congrats on the launch Daryna Kulya & Mahyar Raissi!

Excited to announce that CrewAI raised $18 million in funding, with our series A led by Insight Partners, with boldstart ventures leading our inception round. We're also thrilled to welcome Blitzscaling Ventures, Craft Ventures, Earl Grey Capital, and top AI leaders like Andrew Ng and Dharmesh Shah on board. This investment is a major validation of our vision: CrewAI is delivering on the promise of generative AI for enterprise, transforming automation by harnessing the power of AI agents. Our open-source framework executes over 10 million agents each month and is already trusted by an estimate of nearly half of the Fortune 500 to achieve automations that were previously impossible. With the launch of CrewAI Enterprise, we're making it even easier for large organizations to design, test, and deploy complex AI agents at scale, with high-quality results. Many companies are feeling the pressure to boost efficiency and profitability. Over 65% are exploring generative AI, but concerns about accuracy, data security, speed of development, and impact on the bottom line are holding them back. That's where CrewAI steps in—we bridge that gap. We're helping organizations realize the enormous potential of LLMs, enabling AI agents to perform complex tasks within simple and sophisticated workflows. CrewAI offers advanced features like self-iteration, performance evaluation, persistent memory, and powerful frameworks for agent collaboration—pushing the boundaries of what AI can do. A huge thank you to our employees, customers, partners, and investors. We ship fast and are just getting started. ???

Thank you Cory Bolotsky for sharing this piece and for featuring the work of Aaron Cort (AC) & Sarah Blanchard (formerly Buckley-Green) and how they support portfolio companies at Craft Ventures

As #AI continues to grow exponentially, its impact on the environment does, too. Scope3 is doing the important work of measuring the environmental footprint. We're excited to back Scope3 as they work to reduce AI's environmental impact, empowering businesses to meet their sustainability targets—without sacrificing innovation.