Scratchpad, a Salesforce-based productivity workspace, raises a $33M Series B, following a $13M Series A in February 2021
Scratchpad, a company that has built a modern productivity workspace on top of Salesforce, has raised $33 million in a series B round of funding.
Context & Ripple Effects
Scratchpad's $33M Series B arrives less than a year after its $13M Series A led by Craft Ventures, an unusually fast step-up that signals investor conviction in tools layered directly on top of Salesforce rather than beside it.
It joins a crowded funding lane: Copado raised a $96M Series B for Salesforce-native DevOps with Salesforce Ventures participating, and Sweep later raised $28M for no-code sales playbooks inside Salesforce. The open question is what happens when the platform owner itself starts buying adjacent work categories — Salesforce has since agreed to acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for about $3.6B and picked up Contentful at a steep discount to its 2021 valuation.
First-order effects
- Scratchpad gets the capital to push its sales-team workspace deeper into daily Salesforce workflows, while investors effectively re-underwrite the build-on-Salesforce thesis that Craft Ventures backed in early 2021.
- The round puts Scratchpad in direct fundraising competition with fellow Salesforce-layer startups like Copado and Sweep for the same pool of growth-stage and corporate capital.
Second-order effects
- Every dollar Salesforce spends absorbing adjacent categories — Fin for customer service, Contentful for content — narrows the wedge available to third-party workspace tools, forcing Scratchpad and peers to either move faster than native features or price for an exit.
- Corporate investors like Salesforce Ventures gain leverage over the ecosystem: backing Copado-style startups while the parent acquires around them lets Salesforce shape which independent layers survive.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the Salesforce ecosystem stratifies into a platform owner that consolidates through M&A and a funded but structurally dependent ISV layer whose realistic endpoints are acquisition or feature absorption — the trajectory Sapho's micro-apps-for-legacy-software play already foreshadowed.
- Buyers of sales tooling face a maturing market where 'built on Salesforce' shifts from a distribution advantage to a dependency risk, pushing diligence toward vendors who own their data and surface.
The trend: Venture capital keeps funding a startup layer on top of Salesforce even as Salesforce itself acquires its way across the same work categories, tightening the platform-dependency tradeoff for every ISV in between.