Sales

December 19, 2025
Newsletter

Qualified Acquired by Salesforce: A 7-Year Outcome Built on a 27-Year History

Salesforce announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Qualified, a leading provider of agentic AI marketing solutions.

On paper, it’s a fairly clean seven-year story:

Founded in 2018
Series A ($12M) in 2020 → Series B ($51M) in 2021 → Series C ($95M) in 2022
A deeply entrenched footprint inside the Salesforce ecosystem
AI layered in at exactly the right moment

But there’s more to the story.

Qualified was founded by Kraig Swensrud (former Salesforce CMO) and Sean Whiteley (former Salesforce SVP), who are Salesforce alumni.

What most people don’t realize is that this wasn’t their first acquisition…or even their second.

Sean and Kraig have been building together for nearly 30 years.

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The first company: Kieden

Their first company, Kieden, was founded in the mid-2000s and acquired by Salesforce in 2006.

They stayed on as operators inside one of the most important category-defining companies of the last generation. That experience mattered.

Inside Salesforce, they lived inside it as it was being constructed. They learned how distribution hardens into a moat, how alignment between product, marketing, and sales becomes an operating system, and how enterprise buyers actually behave under real constraints. Just as importantly, they saw what breaks at scale – what has to be rebuilt when a company moves from selling a product to running a platform.

That rewired their mental model for company-building.

The second company: GetFeedback

They then founded GetFeedback in 2013.

GetFeedback embedded itself deeply inside Salesforce. Customer experience data lived directly in the workflows teams already used. The product became useful, then essential. GetFeedback was acquired by SurveyMonkey in 2019.

The third company: Qualified

The journey didn’t stop at two companies.

“We decided that we had too much passion for the idea, and we were also a little bit too young to retire, so we decided to jump in.”
— Sean Whiteley

By the time Qualified launched in 2018, this was their third time building, scaling, and selling together.

Same co-founders, same trust. They were also joined by technical co-founders who had been with them across multiple companies. At the third round, the insights had compounded.

Qualified is a seven-year outcome built on decades of pattern recognition, scar tissue, and earned conviction.

Co-founders who compound

Having the right co-founder can determine the trajectory of your business. Conversely, having the wrong co-founder can also.

We took a sample from the GTMfund portfolio to share stories of how startup co-founders met. Whether you’re actively seeking a co-founder, might in future, appreciating your existing partner or celebrating your founders as a go-to-market leader, these serve as sources of insight and inspiration.

Professional Colleagues

Company: UserHub

Co-Founders: Patrick Rafferty and Silas Sewell.
How they met: Met during the formative years of another startup.

Patrick: “We met during the formative years of another startup (Reonomy). Silas was the principal engineer, and I was the Head of Product. We formed a friendship after working side-by-side through many late nights. I enjoyed building products with Silas, and I knew I wanted to work with him again. So, here we are!”

Company: WorkRamp

Co-Founders: Ted Blosser and Arsh Mand.
How they met: Met during a road trip to Tahoe while working at Box.

“We met each other on a road trip to Tahoe in 2011. We were both working at Box at the time, and were stuck in a traffic jam for eight hours. It was the start of a lifelong friendship and business partnership, leading to the founding of WorkRamp in 2015.”

Social Media

Company: Arrows

Co-Founders: Daniel Zarick and Benedict Fritz.
How they met: Met through Twitter, became friends and built projects together.

Daniel: “Benedict and I met through Twitter. We had been following each other back in 2012 through game design circles we were both in. Then when I moved back to Chicago in 2013, we decided we should finally meet in person. It turns out we lived just two blocks from each other and we became fast friends. Together over the years we’ve built joke iOS apps, worked on big client projects, participated in each other’s weddings, and have now been building Arrows for around 5 years. I can’t help but feel it’s a superpower to have known, worked with and trusted someone for so long.”

Introduced by a mutual Connection

Company: Keyplay

Co-Founders: Adam Schoenfeld and Andrew Rothbart.
How they met: Introduced by a VC.

Adam: “We were introduced by Tim Porter, a great VC at Madrona here in Seattle. I was just catching up with Tim and mentioned to him that I was starting to think about doing another startup and wanted to start networking with possible technical co-founders. Coincidentally, Tim had met Andrew recently about his interest to do a startup, so he connected us over email. We met for a walk on a lovely spring day. We had a very long conversation about life, personal values, business philosophy, and startup ideas. After that we decided to find a small side project we could work on together to see if we liked collaborating. The project was a blast. At that point I figured we would be off to the races and co-found something, but Andrew had a baby on the way and decided it wasn’t quite the right time. We stayed in touch for several months… the baby arrived… Andrew’s life normalized a bit… the stars aligned… and the rest is history. We are forever grateful to Tim for connecting us.”

Company: Esper

Co-Founders: Maleka Momand and Lilli O’Hara
How they met: Introduced through a mutual friend.

“We met through a mutual investor friend!”

Spouse or Partner

Company: Closinglock

Co-Founders: Andy White and Abigail Holloway White.
How they met: Andy and Abigail are spouses.

“In 2017, Abby was working at a real estate company when one of their home buyers nearly lost their life savings due to a spoofed email. After researching the problem with Andy, the two decided something needed to be created to protect home buyers. Andy’s engineering background and Abby’s real estate background made them a perfect pair to solve this massive problem.”

Educational Institution

Company: Default

Co-Founders: Nico Ferreyra and Victor Papyshev.
How they met: Met while in undergrad as co-captains of their university’s Formula SAE team.

“Victor and Nico met while in undergrad as co-captains of their university’s Formula SAE team, where they led a team of 35 students building a formula-style race car. They started working on their first software company shortly after, and eventually left to pursue building startups full-time. After building and selling products for a couple of years, they discovered a massive pain-point in the inbound sales workflow and went all-in on Default.”

Company: Pocus

Co-Founders: Alexa Grabell and Isaac Pohl-Zaretsky.
How they met: During the application to a class called Lean Launchpad.

Alexa: “I was at Stanford business school and he was at Stanford Engineering, but we actually met to apply to a class called Lean Launchpad where they help you incubate different startup ideas. I had this idea around unlocking data for go-to-market teams. I was co-founder dating, he was co-founder dating. I had four roommates at the time all at Stanford in the business school and everyone was trying to win over Isaac. It was like the Bachelor gone SaaS!”

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