It’s safe to say that Veeva is not a household name, but 10 years ago this month the company launched the first of a set of enterprise tools, like content..
It’s safe to say that Veeva is not a household name, but 10 years ago this month the company launched the first of a set of enterprise tools, like content management and CRM, designed for the unique requirements of the pharmaceutical and life sciences industry.
You have to remember, this was a fairly revolutionary notion a decade ago when very few companies were running enterprise software in the cloud, except perhaps for Salesforce. “Starting Veeva, I had the idea or vision you could make very industry-specific software in the cloud and it would be bigger than anyone would have thought. In 2007, [most] people thought that was incorrect,” company founder and CEO Peter Gassner told TechCrunch.
That’s putting it mildly. In 2007, most people had no concept of cloud software, let alone in a regulated industry like life sciences, but Gassner and his co-founders firmly believed that they had a sound idea and that it would be successful.
The company pushed the bounds of conventional thinking even further by building Veeva on top of Salesforce’s fledgling development platform , Force.com.
It’s not a coincidence that Gassner came out of Salesforce in 2007 where he helped build that very platform, meaning he probably knew how to build software on Force.com better than anyone at that time. One of the company’s earliest backers was Gordon Ritter, founder and general partner at Emergence Capital, who saw potential where most investors saw pitfalls. Emergence invested $4 million into Veeva in June, 2008.
