CustomerSuccessBox, an ‘actionable’ customer success platform for B2B SaaS (software as-a-Sservice) companies, has raised $1 million in pre-series A funding led by pi Ventures with participation from Axilor Ventures. The funding will be used to drive growth and product innovation.
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 life time Value (LTV) for SaaS businesses.
CustomerSuccessBox was founded in 2016 by Puneet Kataria, the founder and CEO, who comes with over 16 years of marketing, sales and customer success experience and Amritpal Singh, cofounder and CTO, who comes with over five years of new product development experience. CustomerSuccessBox is being used by success managers at global B2B software companies including XebiaLabs, WizIQ, Synup and WoowUp. Its patent pending technology has processed over 30 million data points from over 100,000 end users to calculate Account Health Scores.
Kataria says, “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”.
Abishek Surendran, partner, pi Ventures, says, “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.”
pi Ventures is India’s first applied artificial intelligence, machine learning and IoT focused early stage venture fund, founded by Manish Singhal (ex-cofounder and CEO, LetsVenture and prominent angel investor) and Umakant Soni (ex-director for India, Science Inc and cofounder of AI BOT). pi Ventures focuses on healthcare, logistics, retail, fintech and enterprise sectors and has so far invested in Zenatix (data-driven energy efficiency), SigTuple (revolutionising global healthcare space through data driven intelligence), NIRAMAI (non-invasive, non-touch, non-radiation approach to detect breast cancer) and ten3T (medical grade wearable device).
Gartner predicts that by 2020, more than 80 percent of software providers will have shifted to subscription-based business models. And as per the latest The Subscription Economy Index (SEI) study, SaaS businesses suffer from 27 percent annual customer churn on an average. However, companies pioneering in customer success are able to achieve up to 129 percent MRR retention rates. It’s this gap that CustomerSuccessBox aims to bridge.
