SaaS Labs has raised $42 million in a new funding round, less than three months after closing its previous funding, and has acquired two startups as it looks to aggressively grow its automation platform that serves sales and support teams in small and medium-sized businesses.
Sequoia Capital India led the Series B round of SaaS Labs. Base 10 Partners and Eight Roads Ventures, two existing backers, as well as entrepreneurs Anand Chandrasekaran, Allison Pickens, Michael Stoppelman and Amit Agarwal participated in the round. The new funding follows the California and Noida-based startup’s $18 million Series A raise in October.
For large companies and enterprises, there are dozens of tools to bring more efficiency to your sales and support operations. But the same is not true for small and medium-sized companies. This was what Gaurav Sharma learned from his previous venture, called HelloSociety, in the USA. (The company was acquired by The New York Times.)
“SMBs are very unloved and underserved if you look at the software offerings they have at their fingertips,” he told Ploonge in an interview. Companies, by comparison, “have access to incredible tools to improve the productivity of their agents,” he said.
In the last six years, SaaS labs has been building AI-powered tools that are “equally powerful” to empower sales and support teams at smaller companies. These offerings are no-code solutions, eliminating the need for IT staff to deploy them.
“These tools are also very affordable and integrate seamlessly with other business stacks and on-premises hardware solutions that small businesses depend on,” he said.
The challenge facing more than 15 million sales and support agents today is that they have to manually update their call logs and CRM tools that are not designed to provide real-time updates to their managers. This creates a gap in your communication channels where no intervention can happen in real time.
JustCall Dashboard, an offering from SaaS Labs that allows small and medium businesses to set up a cloud-based contact center for sales or support teams in minutes. (Image credits: SaaS Labs)
“Chaos starts to happen when you have a team of five people who are communicating with the customer. So these teams can use our offering called JustCall.io, for example, which integrates with over 100 other business tools. JustCall, which has a database of over 100 million calls to work with, uses machine learning to access call quality and whether the manual or workflow is being followed. Managers can only look at calls that have been poorly rated rather than trying to filter every call,” he said.
The startup has amassed more than 6,000 customers worldwide. Typically, a small business joins the platform paying as little as $150 to $200 a year to use SaaS Labs, and overtime happily moves into paying tens of thousands of dollars as their business grows.
More than 70% of these customers are based in the US today and 10% in the UK. Some of their clients include Grab, GoStudent, Booksy, HelloFresh.
The startup, which has been profitable for years, said it increased its revenue by 2.5 times last year.
On Thursday, it also announced two acquisitions – Poland-based CallPage, a callback automation tool for sales teams to instantly connect with their leads, and France-based Atolia, a productivity and collaboration tool. . (Their teams will join Saas Labs as full-time employees.) Sharma said these acquisitions are helping SaaS Labs to broaden its product offerings and also deepen its presence in multiple markets.
A portion of the new funds will be used to acquire many more startups, Sharma said.
“While we are well capitalized, this round gives us the firepower to double down on what is working, hire top talent globally, launch innovative products, focus on brand marketing and be aggressive with strategic mergers and acquisitions. As SMBs continue to adopt software to modernize different functions like sales, support and marketing etc. in their business, we are confident that SaaS Labs will be able to capture this opportunity and grow 30x in the next 5-7 years.”
He intends to make SaaS Labs public in the next four to five years, he said.
“SaaS Labs is building a multi-channel customer communication platform for small and medium businesses. Through a suite of products, it offers an experience that combines the efficiency of digital and the intimacy of offline communication channels,” said Tejashwi Sharma, MD, Sequoia Capital India, in a statement.
“Their flagship product JustCall, for example, was able to have a profound impact. Customers, on average, reported time savings of 12 hours per week per agent on manual tasks, while customer satisfaction improved by 30%. Sequoia Capital India is excited to partner with Gaurav and the team as they build the future of customer communication,” he added.