Collabspot’s Mentor Joins It, Pumps In $79,000 Of His Own Money

Collabspot, an email CRM startup, has just received $79,000 (S$100,000) from a former mentor, Laurent Gasser, who also joins the company as director of business development.

Collabspot provides a service that layers CRM (customer relationship management) software into Gmail. It’s targeted at the SME crowd, and promises to simplify data entry by letting workers save emails into the company CRM without having to manually enter details in.

It was founded in Singapore last year, and relies on a team of developers in the Philippines.

The company went through JFDI. Asia‘s 100-day bootcamp program in February, and received $20,000 (S$25,000) in angel funding from the accelerator. During the program, it was mentored by Gasser.

Gasser is the co-founder of Google Apps reseller, Revevol, which he started in France in 2007. He was an early reseller of Google Apps outside of the US. Revevol operates in 10 countries now.

There has been a growing pulse of activity around email CRM. Tylr Mobile just launched an email inbox connected to CRM giant, Salesforce.com. Two months ago, Washington, D.C.-based Contactually, closed $1 million in seed funding for its lightweight email CRM tool.

Jeremi Joslin, founder and CEO of Collabspot, said the company has about 500 paying customers now, and has a churn rate of 2 percent. Its revenue covers its overheads, and he plans to raise a seed round soon in order to set up a stronger marketing team in the US.

His focus on the US is underscored by 60 percent of its customer base coming from the US right now. 25 percent are in Europe, and 15 percent are in the Asia-Pacific, he said. Collabspot just signed three resellers in North America, to add to three more outside of the region.

Collabspot will present its product at JFDI’s demo day on 3rd June. JFDI’s next batch of startups will begin the program in August 2013.