Rocketlane, a SaaS startup that provides an automation platform to professional services teams in the US, India, Europe, and other countries, has raised $24 million in new funding as it plans to employ AI to help businesses better understand customer feedback.
Enterprise professional services teams are tasked with delivering projects to customers on time and on budget. However, for such a critical task, these teams lack an integrated solution and often juggle multiple tools to get the job done. This leads to delayed project delivery and customer anxiety. Recently, a category called Professional Services Automation (PSA) has emerged for service teams. However, some known PSA solutions still rely on legacy software, resulting in inaccurate project health reporting and a subpar delivery experience.
That's where Rocketlane comes in. The UT and Chennai-based startup is replacing several tools that professional services teams use on client projects, including time tracking, resource management, project accounting and management, and document collaboration and communication, with what it calls an “all-in-one modern PSA platform.”
Founded in April 2020 by two-time entrepreneurs Srikrishnan Ganesan, Vignesh Girishankar, and Deepak Bala, Rocketlane was initially focused on helping customers onboard, but has since broadened its scope to focus on serving the needs of professional services teams.
The concept for Rocketlane was born out of problems the co-founders faced while onboarding customers at FreshChat, an in-app messaging startup they previously built, which Freshworks acquired in 2015.
“We felt that the projects that our professional services teams were running were causing a lot of anxiety both internally and externally. And the pattern we saw was that this is the moment where the customer experiences a partnership with the vendor. And if it's going well and it's a happy partnership, the customer doubles down on that partnership,” Ganesan told TechCrunch.
Rocketlane has a professional services team of 150-2,000 people and targets mid-market and small enterprise customers. Its customer base includes SalesLoft, OpenGov, LivePerson, Fivetran, and Uniqus. The startup competes with core PSA platforms like Kantata and project management tools like Asana and Monday.com by combining both.
The all-equity Series B funding, co-led by 8VC, Matrix Partners India and Nexus Venture Partners, will enable Rocketlane to strengthen its PSA platform.
Ganesan said the startup plans to introduce conversational AI to help professional services teams get signals from customer meetings about whether they want to continue paying for a project or can postpone it. Rocketlane is also introducing AI templates for emails and documents that the services team will use. Additionally, the startup is upgrading the customer portal it offers companies for their customers with a website builder-like experience to match their brand.
Rocketlane currently has 500 paying customers worldwide, with 60% of its total revenue coming from the U.S. The company plans to expand in the U.S. by hiring more leadership and sales positions, and is also looking to expand into Europe with a one-day event in September.
The startup has 120 employees, 15 of whom are in the US and the rest in India.
Rocketlane has raised $45 million to date and plans to raise $18 million in a Series A round in January 2022. Ganesan said the startup's valuation has roughly doubled since its last round but declined to provide details, and said it expects revenue to grow more than 3.1 times in 2023.
