Pioneering intelligence-driven Customer Success Platform secures one of Europe’s largest seed rounds in the SaaS segment in Q322, enabling the build of their Machine Learning layer and European footprint expansion.
Velaris, the modern Customer Success Platform for B2B tech, has raised €4.7M in seed investment initiating a new era of true AI-powered Customer Success. The capital raised was led by Octopus Ventures and included VCs, Zaka and Fintech 365.
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The investment will be used to build a Machine Learning-led layer to Velaris’ platform enabling B2B tech companies to wholly understand their customers, deepen the relationship, and retain and expand their business with them through data-driven decisions. Velaris will also use this capital to develop R&D, Product and Go-To-Market teams in both London and Madrid, adding to their existing hub in Sri Lanka.
Velaris was born out of the founders’ own experiences at various scale-ups, where they recognized a distinct market gap for a CRM to leverage the latest technologies to specifically target and adequately support modern Customer Success teams. As data continues to grow exponentially, the innovative single-pane solution addresses this challenge alongside other key issues for B2B tech businesses: siloed customer data in the nine-or-so internal tools used to manage a customer’s different touch points, a lack of intelligence to impact NRR and advanced reporting and execution capabilities for Customer Success teams.
Dilanka Kalutota, Co-Founder commented: “We are incredibly excited to have raised this capital. The seed round will enable us to launch our intelligence layer and gain a unique position within the market to be the first AI-led Customer Success platform. Velaris will serve the entire organisation enabling horizontal growth in other teams and becoming the single source of truth for customer data.”
According to Allied Market Research, by 2030, global SaaS is expected to grow at a CAGR of 18.8% and be worth ~$700B, up from the estimated $121B in 2020. Not by coincidence, Customer Success demand has also skyrocketed as increasing emphasis is placed on retention and expansion; customer success jobs are one of the top in-demand jobs on LinkedIn today, while the sector has seen a 600% growth of Chief Customer Officers in the last 12 months.
Conor Scanlan, Investor at Octopus Ventures comments: “Octopus Ventures backs the people and ideas that are changing the world, and Velaris is exactly that. The brilliant people who make up the Velaris team, combined with their hyper focus on user experience and impacting NRR are already making them a leader. The addition of machine-led intelligence will alter the customer success space entirely, not to mention the tech businesses they’re supporting. We were impressed by the team’s ability to build such a powerful product in under a year and are delighted to be a part of this holistic and data-driven step change.”
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Looking more broadly too, a lesson learnt from the 2020 pandemic and today’s economic volatility is that customer-centric companies with a deep focus on retention are proving to be the ones surviving and, in many cases, thriving throughout. The most critical metric of this being Net Revenue Retention (NRR) – the ability to annually grow the business without needing to add new customers – shown by the strong correlation between the evaluation of publicly traded SaaS companies and retention is a key indicator of this. So, in these challenging times, retaining and expanding existing customers – as opposed to focusing on new sales – should be the number one priority as budgets are being cut and growth starts slowing down.
Co-Founder José Fernández-Castaño comments: “Understanding this economic landscape, Customer Success teams are uniquely positioned to help their companies weather the downturn through retention and expansion of existing revenues. We’re thrilled to now enable CS teams with a truly innovative and game-changing solution. With Octopus Ventures’ belief in Velaris, we’re able to democratise customer experience data and empower CS teams to have a greater impact across the company.”
Unlike some legacy predecessors and contemporaries also in the space, Velaris concentrates on a frictionless UX to encourage the use of customer experience data that will ultimately contribute to running a better company. This includes flexible reporting that incorporates intelligence with multiple data streams such as product, revenue and performance within the dashboard.
Anuj Sharma, Head of Customer Success at Vector.ai said: “Velaris helped us immensely in structuring our CS operations. The platform has enabled us to unify important information from disparate data sources, remove the silos and create an actionable 360-degree view of our customers. With smooth onboarding, great service and an excellent product, we’ve already started to see its value. We’re very impressed and happy with the switch we made.”
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