Today we’re publicly launching Subskribe, and announcing our Series A and Seed funding led by 8VC and Slow Ventures. Subskribe is the Adaptive Quote-to-Revenue platform for the Post Subscription Era.
(Read coverage in VentureBeat, TechCrunch and SiliconAngle).
Today’s SaaS Deals are Different
Having spent years in the industry, we realized that existing billing systems prevent SaaS companies from reaching their revenue potential. Today’s SaaS companies are offering complex ramp deals, usage-based pricing, bundling products and services together. Sales teams struggle to even quote for those.
If you think through the quote-to-revenue process, sales teams quoting dynamic deals is just the beginning. The deal then has to flow through its lifecycle across the billing and revenue systems with integrity:
This is where the trouble really starts since quoting, billing, and revenue systems were just not designed to handle dynamic deals. For example, your quoting system might not know how to create a quote for a ramp deal. Or your billing system might not know how to create invoices for products that are billed by usage. Or your revenue recognition system might not know how to allocate revenue for the dynamic deals you've already closed. It’s a problem that hits sales, finance, and compliance teams.
We felt that the industry needed a truly unified system architected from a clean slate to handle modern SaaS use cases from day one. We have experienced the pain first-hand and are deeply motivated to create a world where CFOs and sales teams alike love their quote-to-revenue systems.
So we started Subskribe, spoke to more than 100 businesses, and collaborated with leading SaaS companies (public, pre-IPO, and midsize) to design and build a breakthrough product. To achieve this, we have built a “Google-caliber” dream team of engineers and designers, shipped product at a blazing pace, and crafted a Customer-First, API-First, Remote-First, Empathy-First (CARE-First) culture that our employees love.
A New Architecture For New Deals
As Frank Slootman the Snowflake CEO says, architecture matters. We agree. A superior architecture is foundational to a delightful customer experience.
Putting on our product manager hats, the requirements sound straightforward:
1. Build a product that supports the dynamic SaaS deals that customers want, natively
2. Make sure it works end-to-end, flawlessly
The only problem? This is a really complex multi-module system, and you have to think about all the corner cases that might break the design, evaluate if they matter, and if they do then figure out a way to handle them.
An Adaptive Quote-to-Revenue Platform
Working through the problem, we realized that we needed a completely new architecture: one that was highly flexible yet consistent end-to-end. The answer turned out to be elegant in its simplicity: a versatile data model based on an ‘order’ that travels across quoting, billing and revenue to provide consistency, and a highly performant, modular service architecture for flexibility. So that’s what we’ve built at Subskribe: an Adaptive Quote-to-Revenue platform for the Post Subscription Era.
Of course, we are not the only ones to realize that post-subscription billing is broken. Incumbents too will claim to have a unified quote-to-revenue system. Usually, they have acquired multiple systems and bolted them together. But the underlying problem remains in the data model. The shift from licensing to subscriptions was fundamental, and the transition to dynamic deals based on consumption, bundles, and ramps is no less significant. That’s what’s exciting for us and our customers.
As we welcome this new day for new deal types, and the launch of Subskribe, I do want to take this chance to thank my co-founders Yibin Guo and Prakash Raina, as well as the entire Subskribe team. Plus of course Sam Lessin at Slow Ventures for his early support in our Seed round, together with a star-studded list of angel investors from the likes of Amplitude, Asana, Coupa, Dialpad, Okta, Plaid and UIPath. Then Alex Kolicich at 8VC led our A round funding and has been fantastic to work with. Finally, it’s an entrepreneur’s honor to have design partners engage to help guide the development of the platform and to see early customers like Gremlin and BigID take the leap with us. Thank you all.
Today we celebrate our official launch. Tomorrow we get back to work shaping the future of quote-to-revenue. Come join us, we’re hiring!
