Mavenlink

Company History

Mavenlink was founded in 2008 by Ray Grainger, Roger Neel and Sean Crafts. The idea for Mavenlink was conceived when the three co-founders, who had previously worked at InQuira together, realized there was an opportunity for small and medium-sized businesses to leverage enterprise software applications for managing projects and conducting business online, and access a wide network of consultants and service providers.

With the growth of cloud computing in 2008 and increased business expenditures in IT cloud services, the co-founders saw an opportunity to create a workforce collaboration tool that would address an ecosystem of internal and external workforces. Mavenlink’s brand name was partially inspired by the concept of “Mavens,” a personality type described in The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell defined “Mavens” as “information specialists,” or “people we rely upon to connect us with new information.”

In April 2009, after seven months of development, the first Mavenlink software platform was released in beta to approximately 1000 users. After several months of beta testing, Mavenlink became generally available to the public in January 2010.

In June 2010, Mavenlink enabled integration with Google Apps, allowing users to sync the Mavenlink software with Google Drive, Calendar, Contacts and Tasks.

In January 2011, Mavenlink enabled users to integrate with Intuit Quickbooks software to manage job costing, invoicing, payroll and project accounting.

By February 2011, approximately 200,000 users had subscribed to the Mavenlink software, with thousands of new users being added each month.

In March 2014, Mavenlink launched EmergentPath.com, an online publication for professional services businesses.

In June 2014, Mavenlink was named one of Google’s first Premier Technology Partners for the Google Apps Partner Program.

Funding & Investments

In February 2009, Mavenlink secured $1 million in investment capital during its Angel round of funding, which was led by current and former Accenture partners. In November 2011, Mavenlink secured $3.9 million from Quest Software, Inc. and Madden Capital Partners, LLC., and in January 2012, the company received an additional $3 million from Quest Software, Inc. and Madden Capital Partners, LLC. In December 2013, Mavenlink received an institutional investment from Carrick Capital Partners in the amount of $7 million. In November 2016, the company announced a Series D funding round of $39 million from Goldman Sachs.

Product features

Mavenlink’s user and account model is built on a cascading permission set where only those users given “Administration” rights on the account can invite additional users and manage the permissions, financial rates, and privileges of the other users on the account.

All project-specific collaboration, file sharing and communication is visible only to users invited to participate in those projects, allowing administrators to choose which users have access to certain areas. Users can be removed from projects, allowing the project administrator to take away their visibility into that project.

Mavenlink supports many international character sets for its internal social collaboration feature. Mavenlink allows projects to be conducted in any international currency, supporting the currency symbols and localized currency formatting, allowing for budgets, rates, and billings to be expressed in local currencies.

Mavenlink’s API provides easy access to most of the data model. Most internal Mavenlink development is performed on top of the public API. The Mavenlink API supports the OAuth 2 authorization model for secure, user-based access.