Scratchpad, which develops productivity tools in Salesforce for sales teams, raises $13M Series A led by Craft Ventures
Context & Ripple Effects
Scratchpad's $13M Series A lands mid-wave: within roughly two years, investors put nine-figure sums into companies that treat Salesforce not as a product but as a substrate — Copado's DevOps platform built for Salesforce, OwnBackup's backup and recovery tools covering Salesforce, Spiff's commission automation, and later Sweep's no-code sales playbooks all raised on the same thesis.
For lead investor Craft Ventures, reportedly targeting about $1B for a new fund, this is an early flagship bet in that category — and it paid forward quickly, with Scratchpad following up less than a year later via a $33M Series B.
First-order effects
- Scratchpad gets the capital to expand its Salesforce-native workspace for sales teams beyond its initial footprint, with Craft Ventures gaining a marquee position in the fastest-growing corner of the Salesforce ecosystem.
Second-order effects
- Sweep's later entry with no-code sales playbooks in Salesforce confirms the niche Scratchpad validated is now contested — differentiation shifts from 'built on Salesforce' to which workflow layer owns the rep's day.
- Adjacent Salesforce-ecosystem vendors like Qualified and Copado compete for the same buyer budget, pushing each toward broader suites rather than single-point tools.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Salesforce solidifies into a platform economy where independent vendors own the workflow layers above the CRM — a structure Salesforce itself has since leaned into through large acquisitions such as its ~$3.6B deal for AI customer service platform Fin (formerly Intercom).
The trend: Venture capital is systematically funding a startup layer built on top of Salesforce, turning the CRM into infrastructure that third parties monetize.