Behind The Deal: Salsa Labs' $5M

Salsa Labs' latest round of funding comes from old and new faces. The company, which provides software to nonprofits and political campaigns, nabbed $5M from old friend Edison Ventures. It then added a new investor: the Maryland Venture Fund, which requires the firm to move to Maryland. CEO Scott Stouffer says Salsa Labs will also hire more sales and marketing people. The 65-person company spent 2013 beefing up its customer base beyond nonprofits and political campaigns clustered in the DC region. Scott says those efforts will result in increased revenue by the end of the year. The company's cloud-based software helps organizations manage their online fundraising, advocacy, email, social media, and donors.

Salsa Labs, which has raised a total of $11.5M, eyed bringing in more investors to join Edison but realized most wanted to see the results of its new customer growth strategy first. Scott, who joined Salsa Labs in 2012, says half of its employees are in DC and half are in Reston. It realized that putting them together under one roof would make sense considering the nature of the work. Scott, who had co-founded Visual Networks in the early '90s, took it public and grew it to $100M in revenue, had ties to the Maryland Venture Fund. It was an early investor in Visual Network (so, cha-ching when the IPO happened) and he sat on its board at one point. The company will move to Maryland by the end of this year.