​Sparta growing 400% year on year, raises additional venture financing, aims to become the global standard for “sales performance management”

18th December 2015 - Stockholm

Sparta (Hysminai AB), a Stockholm-based technology company has today announced that it has raised capital from a range of institutional and private investors.

Sparta provides sales gamification software to sales organisations to help them drive organic revenue growth, motivate their sales staff and build stronger sales culture. Since founding in late 2013, the company’s client roster includes customers across a variety of industries such as Com Hem, Modern Times Group, Expressen, Retail and Brands and Hyundai.

Sparta is used by companies and sales organisation with the biggest challenge of all - motivating salespeople and driving organic sales growth. By helping teams to achieve these two goals, Sparta have driven some extremely positive ROI for their clients.

Sparta, which was founded and headed up in late 2013 by James Pember, have built a platform which helps sales organisations to motivate their sales staff and grow revenue by tapping into “gamification” i.e. the use of game mechanics to inspire performance. Sparta today helps clients run more effective competitions, campaigns and incentive programs, all from a simple to use cloud-based product.

The positive ROI and easy-to-use service has been a key driver of growth, including referrals and word of mouth from current customers. While sales focus has been on Sweden, there are several international customers already, and according to the company, their sights are firmly set on establishing a second market presence in the United Kingdom during 2016.

James Pember, CEO on the financing round:

“Whilst never fully satisfied, we’re really pleased with the progress we’ve made in 2015. We’ve managed to break past the 100 enterprise customer mark, and have organically grown our annual revenue by almost 400% this year. In addition, I’m proud of the team we are building and we’ve doubled our headcount since August, from 5 to 10. Regarding the fundraising, I’m very pleased to welcome these new investors into our company and I’m excited about what we can achieve together in 2016 and beyond.”

New investors participating in the investment round are:

• Almi Invest (Johan Crona leading)
• Lars Lindgren (founder of Swedish Venture Capital Association) - investments in around 10 early stage growth companies.

Lars Lindgren comments:

“Sparta helps their customers increase their sales - something that is important regardless of market conditions. On top of that, the Sparta team consists of a highly qualified group of entrepreneurs, which only helps when it comes to building a successful company!”

Johan Crona, Fund Manager på Almi Invest Stockholm AB comments: 

“Sparta's market is driven by increased digitization, transitions to cloud services and increased demands from companies to motivate and develop sales teams. All this increases the demand for specialised services and Sparta’s offering is perfectly aligned for continued growth."

In addition to the new incoming investors, existing angel investors Henrik Torstensson (CEO Lifesum), Jonathan Forster (VP Sales Spotify) and Martin Ingemansson (GM Nordics Facebook) have also participated.

During 2016, Sparta are looking to expand their product offering, starting with diving deeper into data, gamification and mobile - in order to provide even more value to its customers.

The Sparta team are also looking to add more talent to their current team of 10 staff.