Estonia's unicorn Pipedrive sets its sights on becoming a tripleand even quintupleunicorn
It all began in a cozy summer cottage deep in the Estonian countryside. What sounds like the premise of a tech fairy tale turned out to be the seed for one of Europe's most successful startup ventures.
Founded in 2010, Pipedrive has since catapulted from its near-garage origins to become a unicorn—one of the few Estonian-born companies to achieve that coveted status. But for Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Agur Jõgi, that’s just the beginning: "We are here to keep growing and to become three times unicorn, five times unicorn," he says with absolute conviction.
Pipedrive, for the uninitiated, is a sales CRM platform that has garnered more than 100,000 customers across more than 180 countries. The tool is renowned for its relentless focus on helping small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) close deals faster. It does so by simplifying the staggering amount of data that flows into any salesperson’s day—calls, emails, potential leads, client histories, and follow-up tasks—so that they can spend less time on admin and more time actually selling. As Jõgi explains, "The goal for salespeople is to close deals and hopefully to close healthy deals as fast as possible. Pipedrive should tell you, in an easily understandable way, what your next action needs to be".
But how does a CRM truly evolve as a business matures, especially when it aims to win over the global market of small and medium-sized enterprises? This was one of the key questions Jõgi explored in a wide-ranging interview with Entreprenerd Media. The conversation meandered from Pipedrive’s earliest days in an Estonian summer cottage to strategies for keeping a rapidly growing software company culturally focused. If there is a single secret ingredient to Pipedrive’s success, it’s the "brutal focus" that runs in its organizational DNA.
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The origins: a summer cottage in Estonia
According to Jõgi, two of the company’s five co-founders possessed top-tier sales expertise. They knew exactly how to refine the software to match the real-world needs of its users. And to make sure that Pipedrive remained as simple and efficient as possible, engineers and designers alike had to be deeply aligned with customer success.
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"We are solving the sales need for small and medium-sized businesses. We’re not doing a bit of marketing, a bit of project management, or anything else. It’s all about closing deals".
One tactic Pipedrive uses to keep this single-minded focus is making its entire workforce—everyone from accountants to software engineers—aware of what’s going on with the business day-to-day. A dedicated Slack channel named "Bizmetrics" publishes the company’s wins and losses every morning, so no one is left in the dark. Everyone can see how many new customers have onboarded, where the churn is coming from, and what strategic steps might be needed next.
This flattened organizational structure also helps ensure that crucial decisions don’t get bottlenecked at the very top. Jõgi notes how small, self-sufficient "tribes" within the company own end-to-end features, including design, coding, and security. "One engineer is out, two others can cover," he remarks. "If I’m ill, nothing happens. Someone else will keep the ship sailing forward. We’re all in the same ecosystem."
Europe’s AI model: "A great chance to win"
As Pipedrive accelerates toward its next phase of growth, fresh challenges loom. Chief among them is artificial intelligence (AI). Jõgi believes AI holds the potential to revolutionize how users tap into their data, but the path to leveraging AI ethically and securely is far from straightforward.
For him, the European regulatory framework might actually be a competitive advantage in the long run, not an obstacle. "I think there is no right or wrong answer. In a shorter perspective, the rest of the world is definitely moving faster as they are not restricting themselves so much. In the midterm or in the slightly longer term, I think that Europe has a great chance to win because at first those regulations might look annoying, but those are actually creating trust".
Jõgi points out that once a product is built without consideration for privacy or compliance requirements, it becomes astronomically more expensive—both financially and emotionally—to retrofit those features.
By contrast, if European companies start with strong data-privacy protections in place, they’re automatically better prepared to adapt to global markets that increasingly take a tougher stance on ethical data use. "At one moment, any company wanting to access the European market also has to comply with our laws. If you comply with European regulations, you’re then more or less able to comply anywhere else in the world", he says.
Pipedrive, for its part, is running a series of beta programs to figure out precisely how AI can free up sales professionals from menial tasks like data entry, contact sourcing, and figuring out which leads need immediate attention. Jõgi envisions a future in which AI suggests not just the next set of leads, but also the best channel to reach them—be it email, chat, or social media—based on historical preferences. That’s the kind of personalization that can turn a potential deal into a signed contract.
The future: from unicorn to quintuple unicorn
When asked if that means Pipedrive will pivot away from being primarily a CRM platform, Jõgi is quick to clarify: the company remains steadfast in its mission. "We are focusing on how to structure the data so our customers spend more time actually selling. We’re not building entirely new software. We remain a sales CRM, but the way we leverage data is always evolving."
These strategic moves come on the heels of Pipedrive’s steady global growth. Having recently showcased at a Slush-inspired event in Bilbao, Spain, Jõgi was struck by how intimately interconnected the European startup ecosystem is becoming.
The days of each country working in its own silo are numbered, he says. The idea is to foster a pan-European synergy where companies from different regions—Finland, Estonia, Spain, Portugal—routinely collaborate, cross-pollinate ideas, and boost their growth.
"They define the strategy in scale ups and then in bigger companies" and "they know the goal and then to challenge your people to select the right tooling in their area to move and to meet the goal. It's not to be, it's definitely not, the role is not to be like the smartest technology person in the room. Then I think something is wrong if I think like in a global company, the CTO is the smartest engineer, then that's not a long lasting story, a success story", he explains.
Jõgi also underscores how crucial it is for startups to know their target customers—a piece of advice he believes still holds enormous power. "Know your product, know your customer, and connect those two dots".
"Even if the product is the same, the user’s problem is slightly different each time, so you need to phrase your offering in a way that truly meets their needs". That mantra has allowed Pipedrive to stand out in a saturated CRM market, where many platforms boast extensive features but don’t necessarily solve the users’ most urgent challenges.