With its $10 billion annual run rate, Salesforce.com Inc. boasts a commanding lead in the customer relationship management market. But that’s not deterring smaller players from trying to climb the competitive ladder.

One of the fastest-rising Salesforce rivals out there is San Francisco-based ProsperWorks Inc., which today announced that it has completed a $53 million funding round. Northwest Venture Partners led the investment with participation from five other institutional backers including Alphabet Inc.’s GV private equity arm.

The search giant’s decision to join the round was likely motivated by more than just the direct return potential. ProsperWorks’ CRM service is designed specifically to work with G Suite and has been adopted by more than 25,000 companies so far, making the startup a key partner for Google. Investing in outside developers is a good way for the company to strengthen the ecosystem around its services.

As for ProsperWorks, the startup will invest the capital in hiring more engineers to help enhance its offering. The service stands out from the pack by implementing Google’s Material Design specification in a way that attempts to streamline the often tedious task of managing customer records.

Most notably, ProsperWorks can automatically pull data about leads from a salesperson’s Gmail inbox. The service creates a profile of each contact that includes details such their address, automatically puts new correspondences on file and provides features for automating interactions. One of the main highlights is an alerting mechanism that notifies users if they overlook to contact certain leads.

Alongside these productivity features, ProsperWorks provides the ability for sales managers to monitor the performance of their teams. A visual dashboard shows how each staffer is doing and tracks key statistics such as the number of leads that have been contacted in a given time period. 

ProsperWorks’ feature set seems to be quite popular among customers. The startup claims that 86 percent of its paying users log in every day, which is quite the feat by enterprise software standards.

This has translated into a 34 percent compound monthly growth rate for ProsperWorks. To keep the momentum going, the startup plans to expand internationally and develop integrations with outside services that can help salespeople become more productive.

ProsperWorks has raised $87 million to date.

Image: ProsperWorks