B2B SaaS Sales Startup Kennect Raises $700K in Seed Funding Led by FortyTwo.VC

Kennect, a Delaware and Mumbai-based Software-as-a-Service sales acceleration start-up, has raised USD 700,000 in seed funding led by FortyTwo VC. FortyTwo VC is a Dallas, Texas-based venture fund with an investment focus on disruptive enterprise tech opportunities.

Kennect’s no-code platform allows enterprises to design, simulate and automate their incentive plans. The startup aims to become the preferred and most flexible, intuitive, user-friendly solution for sales incentives. It helps improve sales productivity by providing performance and incentive visibility for the sales reps.

It has targeted to enable more than 100 enterprises for adoption over the next 2 years. Some of its marquee customers include Indian and global pharmaceutical companies like Sanofi, Zydus, Lupin, AstraZeneca, Lonza, amongst others.

Commenting on the seed round, Pulkit Agrawal, Co-founder & CEO, Kennect, said, "We all know sales is hard and managing sales compensation can be a pain point for many companies. Kennect aims to reward the hard work of every sales professional through an incentive platform that helps them stay on top of their incentive earnings. With its intelligent nudge feature, every sales rep is now aware of their next best action in real-time to boost their take-home compensation.”

He added, “With this investment, Kennect plans to ramp up its engineering team and expand its commercial presence in the North American and European markets."

“Incentive design and management is a critical part of successful sales strategy. Kennect is building the new age incentive compensation tool for the Global Life sciences industry. It is one of the few success stories of teams from India building Enterprise focused SaaS products for global markets.

The team at Kennect - Pulkit, Pralok and Omkar have built the foundation for a great business. They have a leading platform, a marquee list of customers and a solid global GTM strategy,” said Asutosh Upadhyay, Co-Founder & General Partner at FortyTwo VC.

About Kennect

Founded in 2017 by Pulkit Agrawal (an IIT Bombay Alumni and an EY consultant) and Pralok Chhajed (previously worked with Takeda Pharmaceuticals, Northeastern University Alumni), Kennect is a leading cloud-based platform to automate incentive compensation management, improve sales rep engagement and drive sales performance. Find out more at https://www.kennect.io/

About FortyTwo.VC

US-based FortyTwo.VC is an early-stage venture capital fund focused on early-stage seed & series A investments exclusively in the B2B SaaS and Enterprise Tech sectors. FortyTwo.VC partners with companies emerging from India and building SaaS / Enterprise tech businesses for North American markets. The fund is headquartered in Dallas, Texas Find out more at www.fortytwo.vc

Conversational Intelligence Platform Zipteams Raises $700K in Seed Funding Led by IndiaQuotient

The funding will enable Zipteams to further strengthen their engineering and machine learning teams to accelerate product development and expand footprints across India and US

Zipteams, a leading conversational intelligence platform for inside sales and customer success teams, today announced the successful closure of $700K seed funding led by IndiaQuotient and a group of angel investors. Zipteams uses AI to make customer conversations more contextual, engaging, and fruitful by enabling sales teams to bring the right data points to their customers at the moment of need.

Sales teams today depend on CRMs for the context and data about the customers, however, today they are more constrained than enabled with the CRMs because of the manual nature of data entry in them. Zipteams will make the $145 bn CRM investments more worthy by automatically capturing customer data right at the source where the conversations are happening.

The funding will enable Zipteams to invest further in its unique concept of intelligent digital salesrooms that have the capability to harness data and bring real-time customer insights to inside sales and customer success teams in virtual meetings. The company will look to strengthen the engineering and machine learning teams to enhance product offerings and seeks to achieve significant user growth in India and the US markets within the next 12-15 months. IndiaQuotient’s experience with a vast network of successful product companies will aid Zipteams in taking strategic go-to-market decisions to achieve an exponential product-led growth journey.

Zipteams has successfully completed a 6 months beta testing of the product and witnessed rampant growth in adoption across Edutech, IT, and SaaS industries. The team is now focused on expanding the use cases for sales and customer success teams across other sectors as well. Zipteams’ intelligent meeting rooms are powered with automatic identification of next steps for sales follow-up routines, self-guided nudges for sales teams to onboard and get trained faster on the job, and a complete repository of customer meetings to keep all their context in one place.

On the announcement, Siddhartha Srivastava, Founder, Zipteams, said, “The proportion of inside vs outside sales teams is continuously growing over the past few years( 45.5% now). Infact, the inside sales teams are growing 15X faster than the outside sales team. However, in this virtual, hybrid setup, there is a considerable demand for advanced technologies to assist the teams to deliver high performance in virtual customer meetings, consistently. With Zipteams, we aim to empower inside sales and customer success teams with a platform to unlock value from the massive data that is being generated in their daily customer conversations. We are already seeing great traction for the product and are continuously growing our waitlist and user base significantly week on week.

With the seed funding, we will strengthen our product and also expand our geographical footprint across India and US. We are highly enthusiastic about the investment at this juncture of our growth and look forward to elevating and innovating our offerings. IQ’s involvement will help us to fast-forward some of the most critical projects, which otherwise would’ve taken time to manifest. IndiaQuotient believes in the future potential of “Made in India” companies and our mission to build a global AI-first SaaS product from India resonates perfectly with that thought process.”

Anand Lunia, Founding Partner, IndiaQuotient said, “We have only seen the tip of the iceberg for ‘India to rest of the world’ SaaS opportunities and IndiaQuotient will continue to back exceptional founders building in this space. Inside sales is a growing market in itself and real-time contextual intelligence will be a significant enhancement in sales conversions and digitising the sales playbook.”

Zipteams’ next product upgrades will focus on advancing their NLP language models to capture nuanced customer intents. This will enhance the organization’s ability to provide real-time revenue intelligence nudges to sales teams while they are actively interacting with their customers on a call. Akash Chatterjee, Co-founder at Zipteams, added, “I’m particularly excited about our configurable NLP layer, which is designed to analyse intent and churn out real-time insights directly on customer calls. We’re making some great strides in designing our virtual calling experience to work seamlessly with our personalised recommendations engine.”

Zipteams enables sales & customer success teams with intelligent meeting rooms to have engaging & fruitful customer conversations and store those in one place. These meeting rooms are powered with automatic identification of next steps for sales follow-up routines, self-guided nudges for sales teams to onboard and get trained faster on the job and a complete repository of customer meetings to keep all their context in one place.

PreSales Intelligence Platform PreSkale Secures $500K in Seed Funding Led by BoldCap

PreSkale Secures Funding Round for Capturing Presales Intelligence to Create Sales Playbooks

PreSales intelligence platform has raised pre-seed funding in a Round led by BoldCap with participation from PointOne Capital 

Tech start-up PreSkale is capturing intel that helps people close a sale and is shining a light on the growing army of ‘PreSales' teams to become revenue creators . The PreSkale proposition and their all-in-one PreSales intelligence platform has raised a $500,000 pre-seed funding round today led by BoldCap with participation from PointOne Capital and strategic angel investors including Sathya Nellore Sampath, Ajith Sowndararajan, Vaidhyanathan, Jayagopal and Archana Priyadarshini.

PreSkale was founded in 2021 by Ajay Jay (Co-founder & CEO) and Prashanth Ganesh (Co-founder & COO) to improve product adoption early in the sales cycle and connect PreSales insights with go-to-market teams.

L-R Prashanth Ganesh and Ajay Jay

During his time at Freshworks & RFPIO, Ajay worked with enterprise clients — managing documents, meetings, product discussions, POCs, RFPs, and other assets across a dozen tools. The workflow was super-tedious, and lacked a centralized platform to offer a well rounded product evaluation experience. Ajay quickly realized his efforts and time weren’t documented either, and it was impossible to track or analyze PreSales influence and contribution across the sales lifecycle.

He started creating one-pagers to store evaluation plans and customer interactions during evaluation. These one-pagers were an instant hit during internal strategy discussions and with external stakeholders as well, as they helped get more done, faster. Ajay collaborated with Prashanth to iterate on this idea, and with an urge to solve these challenges they started building the platform for everything PreSales.

According to McKinsey, the PreSales engine can yield a five-point improvement in conversion rates, a 6–13% improvement in revenue, and a 10 – 20% improvement in the speed of moving prospects through the sales process. McKinsey found that companies with strong PreSales capabilities consistently achieve win rates of 40 – 50% in new businesses and 80 – 90% in renewal businesses — well above average rates.

Recognising the change in buyers mind-set and the impact of PreSales within the Go-To-Market ecosystem, G2 has announced PreSales as a new category in April 2022.

“PreSales stands to be one of the most influential, and impactful go-to-market (GTM) functions for all B2B teams. Yet, today PreSales doesn't garner the same value as other GTM teams. We're building PreSkale to level up PreSales operations for PreSales Engineers, and organizations. From managing day-to-day account tasks, notes, and meetings to generating master-playbooks filled with valuable insights to help PreSales engineers build better product experiences, and improve product adoption, PreSkale does it all” commented Ajay Jay, Cofounder & CEO of PreSkale

PreSkale will use the funds to grow its customer base by 20x and team size by 3x over the next 12 months. It will also invest in Go-To-Market strategy and marketing initiatives to increase reach and awareness.

“PreSales is a relatively large team in most companies, and they generally collaborate across sales, product, and engineering teams. They enable sales teams to sell better and bring customer intelligence, and product requirements back to product and engineering teams. They are important, yet a massively underserved team, and that’s what got us excited” commented Sathya Nellore Sampat, General Partner at BoldCap.

About PreSkale

PreSkale helps PreSales teams streamline evaluation experiences, deliver impactful solutions, and improve technical conversions. With PreSkale teams can:

• Streamline everyday operations effortlessly with the unified workspace and the seamless integrations with existing systems
• Identify and engage with best-fit prospects, document niche product interactions, and accelerate product conviction to drive sales conversions.
• GTM functions can make data-driven decisions with intelligent playbooks powered by PreSales evaluation plans, interactions, efforts, and insights to make effective strategies

For more information please visit https://www.preskale.com/ or follow the company on LinkedIn and Twitter