Cobalt Ridge Capital signed a $38,000 annual contract for 12 seats of Northwind Flow on Wednesday. The Boston-area investment firm has been tracking its fundraising and investor pipeline in a set of shared spreadsheets that Fiona Gallagher, Head of Investor Relations, described on an earlier call as “four tabs and a prayer.”

Marcus Bell, Mid-Market Account Executive, ran the deal. The deciding demo showed Cobalt Ridge’s own pipeline, imported from those spreadsheets, rolled up into a weekly forecast that Gallagher’s team could review without rebuilding it by hand every Monday.

Cobalt Ridge is a slightly different buyer for Northwind: an investor-relations team rather than a sales team. Marcus says two other firms in the same network have asked Gallagher how it went. Onboarding begins next week.

Keystone Logistics expanded its contract by $14,000 in annual recurring revenue on Wednesday, adding Northwind Sync to the Flow subscription it has used since 2024. Ray Donovan, Keystone’s Sales Ops Manager, signed shortly after 2 p.m.

Donovan’s team has been copying forecast categories from Flow back into its CRM by hand every Friday. Sync will write those fields back automatically, using field-level rules so reps can still override their own close dates.

Marcus Bell handled the expansion with Kwame Mensah, Keystone’s Customer Success Manager, who first raised the idea in Keystone’s August business review. It was Marcus’s second signature of the day.

Brightline Health’s security review moved further in one call on Wednesday than in the previous two weeks. Daniel Reyes, Northwind’s CTO and co-founder, joined Enterprise Account Executive Lena Fischer and Brightline’s CISO, Dr. Helen Park, for a 70-minute session that worked straight down the 14-item follow-up list Brightline sent on Tuesday.

Nine items were closed on the call, including data-residency questions and how Copilot handles protected health information. Reyes answered the residency questions by walking through the deployment diagram live, rather than promising a follow-up document.

Five items remain open, including the pen-test summary letter, sign-off on the subprocessor list, the scope language in the HIPAA business associate agreement, and Brightline’s SSO enforcement policy. The opportunity, 60 seats and about $210,000 in annual recurring revenue, is pipeline, not revenue. Lena moved it to Q4 on Tuesday. Clarion is also in the evaluation.

Arjun Mehta, Director of Commercial Excellence at Lumen Biologics, told Lena Fischer on Wednesday that his team builds three separate launch forecasts each month and then reconciles them in a slide deck the night before the leadership meeting. He wants one forecast he can slice by launch without rebuilding it.

Lena showed how Flow’s forecast views can be grouped by a custom product field. Mehta asked for a working session with his CRM admin to confirm the field exists in their data before going further. Lena is scheduling it for next week.

Lumen is an early-stage opportunity for 25 seats. Nothing has been proposed yet.

Patrick Nolan, Head of Sales at Quantum Freight, told Customer Success Manager Kwame Mensah on Wednesday’s check-in that his weekly forecast meeting now runs about 25 minutes, down from an hour in the spring. He credits the deal-change view, which shows what moved since last week so the meeting can skip the deals that didn’t.

Nolan’s one request was a way to share that view with his regional managers without giving them full edit access. Kwame logged it for the Flow team and will follow up after the next release review.

Redwood Medical and Copperleaf Foods were added to the Flow Copilot beta on Wednesday. Both asked to join after seeing it in a peer’s workspace, and both raised the same concern on their onboarding calls: whether they could trust the answers.

Laura Chen, VP Commercial Operations at Redwood Medical, said her leadership team had been burned by a dashboard tool that gave confident numbers nobody could trace. What changed her mind was seeing that every Copilot answer links back to the CRM records it came from.

Irene Novak, VP Sales Excellence at Copperleaf Foods, was more direct about the use case. “My managers spend Thursday afternoons building the story for Friday’s call. If this gets them the story and the receipts, I’ll take it.”

On a renewal-planning call with Elena Rossi on Wednesday, Nadia Petrova, Director of Sales Ops at Vantage Cloud, said the biggest change since turning on Sync has been fewer arguments about whose number is right. “We used to have the CRM number and the Flow number and then whatever the rep said. Now it’s kind of just the one number, and people argue about the deals instead.”

Petrova also asked whether Sync’s field-level rules could be audited, so she can show her finance team who changed what. Elena passed the question to the Sync team.

Northwind Sync 4.12 shipped at 4:10 p.m. Wednesday with a fix for the bug that was dropping multi-select picklist values when Sync wrote back to Salesforce. Silverline Bank reported the problem on Tuesday. 1,840 of its records had been affected since Sync 4.11 went out on September 24.

Ravi Desai, Staff Engineer on the Sync team, traced the cause to a delimiter mismatch in the field-mapping layer: Salesforce separates multi-select values with semicolons, and a change in 4.11 started joining them with commas. The fix restores the semicolon and adds a test for every multi-select field type Sync supports.

A backfill restored all 1,840 Silverline records by 9:30 p.m. Ravi’s team then checked all 212 Sync workspaces and found no other customer affected. Leo Nakamura, Support Lead, kept Silverline’s team updated on Zendesk throughout, and Elena Rossi briefed Grace Liu, Silverline’s SVP Commercial Banking Ops, before the end of the day.

The Flow Copilot beta survey closed on Wednesday with 31 responses. 26 respondents, or 84%, said they would be “very disappointed” if they could no longer use Copilot. Product Manager Sofia Alvarez had set 40% as the bar she wanted to clear before planning general availability.

The written answers were consistent. The most-praised feature is citations: each answer links back to the CRM records behind it. The most common request was a way to ask why the forecast changed from one week to the next. Usage is moving the same way, with beta users asking 1,130 questions in the week of September 21, up from 140 in the week of August 10.

That request ships next. Copilot beta 1.3, which adds forecast-change explanations with citations, is scheduled to reach all 16 beta accounts on Thursday. Sofia will share the full survey readout at next week’s product review.

On Wednesday’s signing call, Dana Whitfield gave two reasons Harbor Freightworks chose Northwind over Clarion. The first was the timeline: Clarion quoted 16 weeks to implement, and Harbor’s sales leadership wanted a working forecast before its January planning cycle. Northwind’s six-week plan gets there.

The second was the security review. Whitfield said Northwind answered Harbor’s questionnaire in two days, while Clarion’s took three weeks and was still missing a SOC 2 bridge letter at decision time. “We kind of took that as a preview of what support would feel like,” she said.

Clarion remains in two other open evaluations: Brightline Health, which is in security review, and Atlas Insurance Group, whose finalist demos are the week of October 12.

Cobalt Ridge Capital never evaluated another vendor. The alternative Fiona Gallagher was weighing was keeping the spreadsheets her team already had. On the signing call with Marcus Bell she said the deciding factor was time: her analysts were spending most of every Monday reconciling tabs before anyone could look at the numbers.

She also said the spreadsheets had become a single point of failure, since only one analyst really understood the formulas.

Ben Carter, RevOps Manager, opened the quarter-close channel at 7:02 a.m. Wednesday with a list of nine deals that could still land and a reminder that nothing counts until it is countersigned in HubSpot. He kept that list current all day, closing out deals as they signed and checking each against its signed order form before it went on the board.

Cobalt Ridge signed before lunch and Keystone Logistics early in the afternoon. Harbor Freightworks came through at 4:52 p.m. Samuel Adeyemi rang the bell in the Boston office at 4:58, to a crowd that had been finding reasons to walk past the sales pod since about 3:30.

Priya Natarajan, Chief Revenue Officer, thanked the whole team in #general, and named the people outside sales who made the day possible: security for the Harbor questionnaire, the Sync team for Silverline, and Leo Nakamura’s support team for keeping customers informed through both.

Zara Hussain, Head of People, announced Wednesday that the Q3 all-hands will be held on Wednesday, October 7. Maya Okafor will walk through the quarter’s results and the Q4 plan, and there will be time for open questions. Remote teammates can join by video, and questions can be submitted in advance through the form Zara posted in #general.

Four people join Northwind this morning. Theo Marchetti joins as a Solutions Engineer and brings a background in logistics software, which should come in handy with Harbor onboarding underway. Amara Diallo joins Customer Success as a Customer Success Manager. Felix Wagner joins the Sync team as a Software Engineer, reporting to Ravi Desai. Rosa Delgado joins as a Sales Development Rep on Jordan Park’s team.

If you see an unfamiliar face in Boston today, say hello.

Northwind signed $2,012,000 in new annual recurring revenue in Q3, 100.6% of the $2,000,000 target. Of that, $1,443,000 came from new customers and $569,000 from expansions of existing ones. The quarter added 19 new customers.

The quarter built month by month: $512,000 in July, $604,000 in August and $896,000 in September. Wednesday alone contributed $220,000, up from $54,000 on Tuesday, with 2 new customers signing.

Expansion held at about 28% of bookings for the quarter. September’s $254,000 in expansion was the highest monthly total of the three, including Bluebird Hospitality on Tuesday and Keystone Logistics on Wednesday.

Northwind’s annual recurring revenue stood at $24.51M at the end of September 30, up 8.2% from $22.65M on June 30. ARR is a point-in-time snapshot of contracted recurring revenue; it reflects bookings once contracts start, net of any churn and contraction, so it does not move one-for-one with the quarter’s bookings.

The Q4 target for new annual recurring revenue is $2,300,000, 15% above Q3’s. The quarter runs October 1 to December 31.

Ben Carter will publish the opening Q4 forecast after Monday’s pipeline review. Brightline Health and Atlas Insurance Group are among the larger open opportunities; both are pipeline and are not counted toward the number until they sign.