Hub, a productivity platform for technical sales professionals, launches with $1M in funding – TechCrunch

Hub, a productivity platform for technical pre-sales, has formally launched with $1 million in seed funding.

CEO Freddy Mangum and CTO Karl Gainey founded Hub in 2020. The pair both had experience in technical sales and recognized the challenges of using spreadsheets to manage their business.

They researched and surveyed sales engineers at big and small companies alike, discovering that many of these professionals were spending a lot of time doing things like “wrangling data to report to management, forcing individual contributors to enter data into a CRM (customer relationship management) system.”

“Performing these kinds of mundane tasks was taking time away from them actually selling,” said Mangum. “We also came to the conclusion that technical sales professionals have been the unsung heroes of sales, behind the scenes driving enterprise.”

So they set about creating a better way for presales, solution architects and sales engineers to manage their day-to-day technical sales activities.

Then COVID hit, and obviously, as Mangum puts it, digital selling became much more real.

“That really accentuated the need for specific commercial tooling,” he said.

San Francisco-based Hub was born. The company describes its offering as a SaaS application that “securely interconnects and complements popular CRM systems and productivity applications.”

As a personalized productivity platform, Hub is designed to help individual contributors manage the sales process. By gaining greater visibility into every step, the goal is to better analyze and do more accurate forecasting so an organization can better “identify investment areas while taking corrective actions in real time,” Mangum said.

“Our tool can help them automate the mundane tasks and put the focus on high-value tasks to actually win more business,” he added.

Targeting technical sales professionals is an underserved market, according to Mangum, which presents tremendous opportunity.

Investors in the company include Tom Noonan, general partner of Atlanta-based TechOperators (and former chairman and CEO of Internet Security Systems, which was acquired in 2007 by IBM for $1.3…