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, 1 and others also participated in the round.

Australian-born came up with the idea for Process Street when running a distributed marketing agency through contractors all over the world. The spreadsheets and project management tools were causing more problems than solutions, he said.

So, the concept behind Process Street was born. Initially, it was an internal tool to structure and manage internal workflows by doing things like documenting and tracking simple checklist-based processes for Patankar’s company.

But then Patankar teamed up with to form a company based on that initial concept while both were staying at a hostel in Argentina.

Today, Process Street has evolved into “a fully-fledged no-code workflow builder with an easy-to-use interface that can handle almost any type of business process, from client implementation to employee onboarding and content approvals,” according to Patankar. And it does this by giving small-and-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and enterprises the ability to create those workflows without having to write code. (Customers are mostly SMBs, with 10 to 20 percent being enterprises.)

The company services over 450,000 registered users – both free and paid – including enterprise customers like , , and , as well as institutions like and .

“Process Street lets you build these workflows and plug them into other SaaS products, all without engineering,” Patankar told Crunchbase News. “It’s the same as a SAP workflow, for example, but for those you need an engineer to come in and design the flow, build integrations and connect the whole thing. Instead, we sell directly into sales or to a customer success manager.”

Over time, the company realized that remote team use was still a “pretty small market,” despite growing fast. So it began to focus on an even greater market–enterprises with distributed teams “looking to standardize and automate work across vast geographical areas.”

“So, while some of these companies are not technically remote, they have a lot of the same challenges as a larger, distributed team,” Patankar said.

As a fully distributed company itself, Process Street has 45 employees working across North America and Europe. It’s grown its revenue to the $3 million to $4 million range and previously raised about $3 million across two seed rounds.

The strategy

The choice of investors was largely strategic, according to Patankar. As part of the financing, Accel Partner will join Process Street’s board. Accel, Patankar said, made sense to lead the round considering its understanding of the SaaS space.

“ is a very intriguing story of a fully distributed team building no-code workflow tools for all types of other distributed teams around the world,” Wong told me.

The company’s customers integrate with hundreds of different SaaS products, and Salesforce, and are among the most popular, according to Patankar. As such, Salesforce Ventures and Atlassian were “obvious partners.”

“Process Street workflows are tightly integrated with other SaaS products and rely on the data and activity happening in these systems to automate work,” he said.

Looking ahead

Process Street’s ultimate goal “is to be the no-code workflow solution for teams everywhere.”

As part of that mission–and what some of its new capital will go toward–the company will be launching a mobile app, introducing more enterprise features and opening up greater API access so that users can control their data and build custom automations.

Process Street also has a large library of premade plug-and-play process templates created by its team, customers and partners. It plans to grow that library with the goal of making it “the largest repository in the world for all business processes and operational playbooks.”

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But what about those other companies that mature more gradually? Is there such a thing as slow and successful in startup-land?

To contemplate that question, Crunchbase News set out to assemble a dataset of . We looked at companies that were founded in or before 2010 that raised large amounts of capital after 2015, and we also looked at companies founded a least five years ago that raised large early-stage funds in the last year.��(For more details on the rules we used to select the companies, check “Data Methods” at the end of the post.)

The exercise was a counterpoint to a dataset we did a couple weeks ago, looking at characteristics of the fastest growing startups by capital raise. For that list, we found plenty of similarities between members, including a preponderance ��of companies in a few hot sectors, many famous founders, and a lot of cancer drug developers.

For the late bloomers, however, patterns were harder to pinpoint. The breakdown wasn’t too different from venture-backed companies overall. Slower-growing companies could come from major venture hubs as well as cities with smaller startup ecosystems. They could be in biotech, medical devices, mobile gaming, or even meditation.

What we did find, however, was an interesting and inspiring collection of stories for those of us who’ve been toiling away at something for a long time, with hopes still of striking it big.

Pivots And Patience

Even youthful startups have been known to make a major pivot or two. So it’s not surprising to see a lot of pivots among late bloomers, who have had more time to tinker with their business models.

One that fits this mold is , provider of a popular meditation app. The company, founded in 2010 by a British-born Buddhist monk with a degree in circus arts, started out as a meditation-focused events startup. But it turned out people wanted to build on their learning on their own time, so Headspace put together some online lessons. Today, Santa Monica-based Headspace has millions of users and has raised $75 million in venture funding.

For late bloomers, the pivot can mean going from a model with limited scalability to one that can attract a much wider audience. That’s the case with Headspace, which would have been limited in its events business to those who could physically show up. Its online model, with instant, global reach, turns the business into something venture investors can line up behind.

Sometimes Your Sector Becomes Hip

They say if you wait long enough, everything comes back in style. That mantra usually works as an excuse for hoarding 80s clothes in the attic. But it can also apply to entrepreneurial companies, which may have launched years before their industry evolved into something venture investors were competing to back.

Take , the vacation rental management provider. The company has been around since 2009, but it began raising VC just a couple years ago amid a broad expansion of its staff and property portfolio. The Portland-based company has raised over $140 million to date, all of it after 2016, and most in a $103 million October round led by technology growth investor .

, which was acquired by Salesforce earlier this week, also took a long time to take venture funding. The Chicago-based provider of business-to-business e-commerce software launched in 2009, but closed its first VC round in 2015, according to Crunchbase records. Prior to the acquisition, the company raised about $30 million, with most of that coming in just a year ago.

Meanwhile, some late bloomers have always been fashionable, just not necessarily as VC-funded companies. , a clothing retailer that specializes in button-down shirts that look good untucked, had been building up its business since 2011, but closed its first venture round, a Series A led by VC firm Kleiner Perkins, last June.

Slow Growing Venture-Backed Startups Are Still Not That Common

So yes, there is still capital available for those who wait. However, the truth of the matter is most companies that raise substantial sums of venture capital secure their initial seed rounds within a couple years of founding. Companies that chug along for five-plus years without a round and then scale up are comparatively rare.

That said, our dataset, which looks at venture and seed funding, does not come close to capturing the full ecosystem of slow-growing startups. For one, many successful bootstrapped companies could raise venture funding but choose not to. And those who do eventually decide to take investment may look at other sources, like private equity, bank financing, or even an IPO.

Additionally, the landscape is full of slow-growing startups that do make it, just not in a venture homerun exit kind of way. Many stay local, thriving in the places they know best.

On the flip side, companies that wait a long time to take VC funding have also produced some really big exits.

Take , the provider of workplace collaboration tools. Founded in 2002, the Australian company waited eight years to take its first VC financing, despite plentiful offers. It went public two years ago, and currently has a market valuation of nearly $14 billion.

The moral: Those who take it slow can still finish ahead.

Data Methods

We primarily looked at companies founded in 2010 or earlier in US and Canada that raised a seed, Series A or Series B round sometime after the beginning of last year and included some that first raised rounds in 2015 or later and went on to substantial fundraises. We also looked at companies founded in 2012 or earlier that raised a seed or Series A round after the beginning of last year and have raised $30 million or more to date. The list was culled further from there.

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