Seed Capital backs Forecast in a $5.5m Funding Round to Bring Automation and Insights to Project Management
Award-winning project management software helps medium-sized businesses collaborate, manage resources and predict future capacity needs
Copenhagen-based Forecast is announcing new funding to grow its AI-powered project management software company. London-based Crane Venture Partners led the $5.5m funding round with participation from existing investors Seed Capital and Heartcore. With the new investment, Forecast has raised $10m in total funding.
Forecast is an AI-powered project management solution that automates manual tasks, adds visibility and predictive capabilities to improve collaboration, workflow and planning. Using Forecast, customers reduce their administrative tasks by 20–40% and gain insights into project risk, resource management and more.
Founder and CEO Dennis Kayser worked as a consultant for many years and grew frustrated by the tedious tasks on every project — from recording time to updating deliverable timelines. He saw the potential of using artificial intelligence in project management by automating administrative tasks and improving project management capabilities with predictive functions such as revenue and demand forecasting.
“We’ve already seen project management enter the digital age, moving from notepads and whiteboards to spreadsheets and task management lists. With Forecast, project management is poised for its next evolution with automation and insights, freeing project managers to instead focus on strategic activities like planning, resource and relationship management. We look forward to helping more mid-sized companies be more efficient and successful with the new investment from Crane and our existing investors.” says Dennis Kayser, founder and CEO of Forecast.
Seed Capital has worked with Forecast and Co-founder & CEO, Dennis Kayser since the beginning of their journey. In 2016 we invested in the company together with PreSeed Ventures and in 2018 we co-led the seed round together with Heartcore.
Niels Vejrup Carlsen, General Partner at Seed Capital: ‘’We love Forecast’s team and their ambitious vision of revolutionizing project management by using AI to optimize and get rid of many of the menial project management tasks today consuming a lot of time with project managers. Companies using Forecast can for the first time ever learn from experience and use these insights to continuously improve their planning, execution and profitability of projects. Forecast’s approach to integration allows customers to start collecting insights improving their businesses from day one without disrupting their existing workflows. This has attracted both a lot of customers with no outbound marketing activity so far; and a lot of investor interest. As seed stage investor, our focus has been to help the team mature to prepare for growth and to help secure the next level investors with international network and deep sector competencies. We are happy in this round to welcome UK based Crane Venture Partners with whom we have previously worked. They are well reputed and have a strong profile within SaaS business software. We are excited about the potential for Forecast and are more convinced than ever that they can become a leading global player within the massive project management market.”
Founded in late 2016, Forecast has helped customers manage more than 40,000 projects with more than 1,000,000 tasks across its global customer base. Forecast’s artificial intelligence capabilities have helped project managers and team members estimate, assign and record time over 400,000 times. Without any outbound marketing to date, Forecast has seen a triple digit increase in annual revenue growth from existing and new customers.
New investor on board, Krishna Visvanathan, Partner at Crane Venture Partners, ads, “We have been extremely impressed with the Forecast team and are excited to back the company for its next stage of growth. With deep insights into its customers’ needs and new data on how to improve project
management, we see great potential for Forecast to help millions of businesses improve their operations, client relations and more around the world.”
For team members, Forecast helps people structure their day, track their time, collaborate and see what work is going on. Forecast fits into people’s existing workflows by integrating with widely used business collaboration applications, including Jira and Slack, development platforms like Github and GitLab, mail apps from Apple Mail, Gmail and Outlook, finance apps
like Xero and Quickbooks and Salesforce CRM.
With its new investment, Forecast will hire across engineering, product, sales, customer success and marketing, growing its 38-person team and opening a new sales office in London early next year.
About Forecast
Forecast is an AI-powered project management solution that automates manual tasks, adds visibility and predictive capabilities to improve collaboration, workflow and planning. By using its AI-powered project management software, customers reduce their administrative tasks by 20–40% and gain insights into project risk, resource management and more. Founded in 2016, Forecast is headquartered in Copenhagen and backed by Crane Venture Partners , Seed Capital , PreSeed Ventures and Heartcore . www.forecast.app
