SaaS startup Rocketlane, which serves professional services teams in countries including the US, India and Europe with its automation platform, has raised $24 million in a fresh investment. It plans to deploy AI to help businesses better understand customer feedback.
Professional services teams in an enterprise are tasked with delivering projects to clients on time and within budget. However, for such a critical task, these teams are unable to reach a consensus solution and often wrangle between multiple tools to get their work done. This delays project delivery and upsets clients. Recently, a category called professional services automation (PSA) has emerged to serve service teams. However, some known PSA solutions still rely on traditional software, resulting in inaccurate project health reports and subpar delivery experiences.
Enter Rocket Lane. The startup, headquartered in Utah and Chennai, replaces several tools that professional services teams use for client projects, including time tracking, resource management, project accounting and management, document collaboration and Communication, with what it calls its innovative PSA. Platform
Founded in April 2020 by second-time entrepreneurs Srikrishnan Ganesan, Vignesh Grishankar and Deepak Bala, Rocketlane initially aimed to help users onboard. However, it has broadened its scope and doubled down to meet the needs of professional services teams.
The concept for Rocketlane came from the problems the co-founders faced while onboarding their users at their pre-built in-app messaging startup FreshChat, which was acquired by Freshworks in 2015.
“We found that the projects that the professional services teams were running were causing a lot of trouble internally and externally … and the pattern we could see was that this is the moment in time when the customer “There's an experience of a partnership with the vendor. And so if it goes well, if it's a happy partnership, the customer doubles down on that partnership,” Gunnison told TechCrunch.
Rocketlane targets mid-market and lower enterprise clients with professional services teams of 150 to 2,000 members. Its customer base includes SalesLoft, OpenGov, LivePerson, Fivetran, Personio and Icertis. The startup competes by combining both core PSA platforms like Kantata and project management tools like Asana and Monday.com.
The all-equity Series B funding, led by 8VC, Matrix Partners India and Nexus Venture Partners, will enable Rocket Lane to scale up its PSA platform.
Gunnison said the startup plans to introduce conversational AI to help professional services teams get signals from client meetings about whether clients want to continue paying for their projects or back out. . Rocketlane is also introducing AI templates for emails and documents that services teams use. Additionally, the startup is upgrading the customer portal that offers businesses a website builder-like experience for their customers to align it with their brand.
Rocketlane currently has 500 paying customers globally, with 60% of its total revenue coming from the U.S. It plans to expand in the U.S. by hiring more leadership and sales positions. Further, it looks set to expand into Europe by hosting a one-day event in September.
The startup has 120 people: 15 in the US and the rest in India.
To date, Rocketlane has raised $45 million, with its Series A round of $18 million coming in January 2022. The startup's valuation nearly doubled from the last round, Gunnison said, without giving details. He also mentioned that the startup saw a revenue growth of more than 3.1 times in 2023.