SUMMARY
The Startup Will Be Using The Fresh Funds To Drive Growth And Product Innovation
San Francisco- and Gurugram-based CustomerSuccessBox, an ‘actionable’ customer success platform for B2B SaaS (software-as-a-service) companies, has raised $1 Mn in a Pre Series A round of funding led by early-stage venture fund pi Ventures and Axilor Ventures.
As per the official statement, the newly-secured capital will be used to drive growth and product innovation.
Commenting on the development, Abishek Surendran, Partner at pi Ventures, said, “The focus of SaaS companies has shifted from customer acquisition to reducing churn. The founding team’s extensive understanding of the customer success space has helped build a world-class product which we have no doubt can help SaaS companies retain customers. The product is a natural fit for AI and ML to automatically calculate customer health.”
CustomerSuccessBox: An Overview Of Its Growth Story
Launched in 2016 by Puneet Kataria and Amritpal Singh, CustomerSuccessBox is a customer success platform which helps B2B SaaS companies reduce, churn and grow their recurring revenue.
It applies artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to automate customer onboarding, product usage analysis and user communication, thus enabling success managers to deliver a superior customer onboarding experience, retain customers, drive, upsell and improve monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and lifetime value (LTV) for SaaS businesses.
At present, the company’s solutions are being used by clients like XebiaLabs, WizIQ, Synup and WoowUp. Its patent pending technology has processed over 30 Mn data points from over 100K end users to calculate account health scores, the spokesperson for CustomerSuccessBox claimed.
Speaking of the latest $1 Mn funding from pi Ventures and Axilor Ventures, Puneet Kataria, Founder and CEO of CustomerSuccessBox stated, “B2B SaaS businesses bleed, churn and struggle with customer retention. Customer churn is the biggest blocker of growth, it’s like trying fill up a leaky bucket. B2B SaaS and subscription businesses cannot continue to operate with the old ‘reactive’ support model. CustomerSuccessBox was built from a clear need for a solution which could deliver ‘proactive’ customer success.”
Pi Ventures: Facilitating AI, ML and IoT Based Innovations In India
Touted as India’s first applied artificial intelligence, machine learning and IoT-focused early stage venture fund, pi Ventures was founded in 2016 by Manish Singhal (Ex Co-founder and CEO of LetsVenture) and Umakant Soni (Former Director India of Science Inc.)
The early-stage venture fund focuses on healthcare, logistics, retail, fintech and enterprise sectors and has so far invested in Zenatix, a data-driven energy efficiency startup; SigTuple a healthtech company; NIRAMAI, a non-invasive, non-touch, non-radiation approach to detect breast cancer and ten3T, a medical grade wearable device.
In March 2017, pi Ventures secured an undisclosed amount of investment from venture capital fund Accel Partners. Later, in May last year, it raised another $3 Mn from International Finance Corporation (IFC), a part of the World Bank Group.
Most recently, in January 2018, the AI-focussed VC fund announced the second close of its $30 Mn fund at $25 Mn. Key contributors to the fund included Sunil Kant Munjal, Chairman of Hero Enterprise Electronic Development Fund (managed by Canbank Ventures), Hero Electronixs and leading HNIs and entrepreneurs.
US-based research and advisory firm Gartner predicts that, by 2020, more than 80% of software providers will have shifted to subscription-based business models. As per the latest The Subscription Economy Index (SEI) study, SaaS businesses suffer from 27% annual customer churn on an average.
With a proper customer success strategy in place, companies can achieve up to 129% MRR retention rates, the report further stated. It is this gap that pi Ventures and Axilor Ventures-backed CustomerSuccessBox aims to bridge.
