SUMMARY
Funding round saw participation from 8VC, Nexus Ventures Partners and Matrix Partners India
Funding to be deployed for expanding team and product offerings
The SaaS startup offers a purpose-built unified workspace for collaborating with customers on onboarding projects
Customer onboarding platform, Rocketlane, has raised $18 Mn as part of its Series A funding round. The round was led by 8VC, among other institutional investors.
Nexus Venture Partners, Matrix Partners India, and Gokul Rajaram also participated in this round of funding.
The new funding round comes barely seven months after the startup announced its seed funding round during which it raised $3 Mn from Matrix Partners India and Nexus Ventures Partners. With this round, the startup has so far raised $21 Mn in funding.
The funding will be used by the startup to expand product offerings, accelerate marketing and expand the team.
The startup was founded in 2020 by ex-Freshworks executives, Srikrishnan Ganesan, Vignesh Girishankar and Deepak Bala. The SaaS startup offers a purpose-built unified workspace for collaborating with customers on onboarding projects. The platform helps businesses streamline their software implementation journeys, provides real-time visibility while elevating the customer experience.
CEO and cofounder of Rocketlane, Srikrishnan Ganesan, said, “This funding round follows on the back of very strong early customer growth, and validates the market pull in the category as well as the clear product leadership position we’ve established. We were also just named a leader by G2 in the client onboarding category.”
Echoing the sentiment, 8VC CTO, Bhaskar Ghosh said, “Rocketlane has dared to provide a fresh new take to serve this category. They have shown stunning execution to deliver a thoughtful and extensible product that is experiencing rapid adoption.”
The startup boasts of a slew of customers such as Chargebee, ParcelLab, Yellow.ai, LinkSquares, Appcues, and Netcore.
The startup also runs Preflight, an invite-only Slack community for onboarding, implementation, and CS professionals. According to the company, Preflight currently serves 1,200 members.
Prior to Rocketlane, the founder trio used to manage Freshchat at Freshworks, after the latter acquired their chat business Konotor in 2015. Thus, began their journey into the world of customer onboarding and founding Rocketlane.
According to a report, the global market size of the customer onboarding platforms is expected to grow from $1 Bn in 2020 to $2.5 Bn by 2025 at a CAGR of 20.4%. While COVID-19 continues to play havoc with the sector, the competition among major players is expected to get fiercer as custom-tailored products become the norm.
On the same lines, Indian SaaS companies are scaling up their products and offering tough competition back home. In 2021, more than 35 Indian SaaS companies had above $20 Mn ARR – a sevenfold increase in the last 5 years.
According to Inc42, between 2014 and 2021, Indian enterprisetech startups have raised more than $9 Bn in funding across 1,200+ deals. The sector is amongst the top-funded sectors for a couple of quarters now. A slew of SaaS companies are also heading for IPOs post Freshworks’ stellar debut.
The SaaS industry has the potential to grow multi-fold in the coming years, but all it needs is a strong push from the government and other stakeholders. The investment proves that despite COVID-19, Indian startups continue to innovate and get rewarded for their path-breaking innovation.
