Recent Posts

Most Used Categories

Category: b2b sales

Founded by a Freshworks alum, sales commission platform Everstage gets $1.7M seed funding

by Catherine Shu

A photo of Everstage founding team Vivek Suriyamoorthy and Siva Rajamani

Everstage founding team Vivek Suriyamoorthy and Siva Rajamani

For sales representatives, commissions are source of motivation—and frustration, too. Commission structures are often complex, and become even more labyrinthine as companies grow. “There is a standard fee, then there’s an implementation fee, there could be a multiplier bonus, there could be accelerators when you reach your quota and get higher quota numbers,” explained Siva Rajamani, the co-founder and chief executive officer of no-code sales commission automation platform Everstage. A lot of this is calculated on spreadsheets by finance teams, so salespeople have limited visibility into how much they are earning. 

Everstage was created to provide more transparency about sales commissions. Sales representatives and other customer-facing employees get real-time data about their performance. They can also use Everstage to forecast the potential commissions form their deals pipeline, giving them incentive to close more sales. The platform uses a modular system, so as companies grow, they can add more automated commission calculations without having to code anything.

Founded in 2020, the platform’s early customers include notable SaaS companies like Chargebee, Postman and Lamdatest. Everstage announced today that it has raised a $1.7 million seed round led by 3One4 Capital. Angel investors included Rippling co-founder Prasanna Sankar; Chargebee co-founders Krish Subramanian and Rajaraman Santhanam; Freshworks chief revenue officer Sidharth Malik; Conga chief technology officer Koti Reddy; Ally.io CEO Vetri Vellore; and RFPIO CEO Ganesh Shankar. The company is headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware, with an office in Chennai, India.

Before starting Everstage (Read more...)

Singapore-based Nektar.ai gets $6M to help B2B sales team collaborate more effectively

by Catherine Shu

A photo of Nektar.ai founders Aravind Ravi Sulekha and Abhijeet Vijayvergiya

Nektar.ai founders Aravind Ravi Sulekha and Abhijeet Vijayvergiya

Organizing information about prospective deals is a challenging task for B2B sales teams, since salespeople usually rely on multiple tools (email, Zoom, WhatsApp, etc) to talk with buyer committees. It becomes even more unwieldy when sales teams work remotely. Nektar.ai is a B2B sales productivity startup that wants to help sales team by reducing the amount of time they spend on manual data entry and providing analytics that can increase their revenue. The Singapore-based company announced today it has raised $6 million in seed funding, led by B Capital Group.

3One4 Capital and returning investor Nexus Venture Partners also participated, along with angel investors like Amit Midha, president of Asia Pacific and Japan at Dell; Ritesh Agarwal the founder and CEO of OYO Hotels;, Kevin Merritt, former president of Tyler Technologies’ data and insights division; Evan Davidson, SentinelOne’s vice president of Asia Pacific and Japan; Deep Nishar, senior managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers; and Tom Donlea, Ekata’s vice president and general manager of APAC.

Combined with its previous round, $2.15 million led by Nexus Venture Partners and announced in November 2020, the new funding brings Nektar.ai’s total seed capital to $8.1 million. The company says this is one of the largest seed rounds ever for a SaaS company based in Asia. Nektar.ai’s workforce is remote-first and the company says half of its team are women.

Singapore-based sales productivity platform Nektar raises $2.15 million seed round

Nektar.ai has been in stealth mode (Read more...)

BuyerAssist launches with $2M in funding to help B2B sales team keep their buyers engaged

by Catherine Shu

A group photo of BuyerAssist founders Shyam HN, Amit Dugar and Shankar Ganapathy

BuyerAssist founders Shyam HN, Amit Dugar and Shankar Ganapathy

Selling enterprise software is much more complicated than convincing a potential customer that your solution is the best and signing a contract. A recent Gartner study found that buying groups for B2B solutions can involve up to six to 10 decision makers, and that the majority of buyers said their most recent purchase was “very complex or difficult” as they came to a consensus while negotiating with vendors.

BuyerAssist, a new startup founded by former employees of sales readiness platform MindTickle, wants to make the buying process as smooth as possible. The company is launching its beta product to the public today with $2 million in seed funding led by Stellaris Venture Partners and Emergent Ventures, with participation from angel investors. The capital will be used for hiring in the U.S. and India, with plans to bring BuyerAssist’s platform out of beta later this year.

Headquartered in San Francisco, with an office in Pune, India, BuyerAssist.io was founded last year by Amit Dugar, Shankar Ganapathy and Shyam HN, all alumni of SoftBank Vision 2-backed MindTickle, a platform that enables companies to train their sales staff at scale. The philosophy behind BuyerAssist draws on HN and Ganapathy’s experience on the sales and marketing side of MindTickle: Ganapathy was its director of strategic accounts, while HN served as head of global sales development.

“We’ve sold half a million dollar deals, and deals where you have anywhere form 10 to 25 people involved (Read more...)