Based between London and Madrid, Velaris has developed a pioneering customer success platform for B2B tech companies. The startup has just raised €4.7 million as it accelerates plans to launch and scale its international presence.
Building strong customer relationships is critical for businesses across verticals and markets. Catering to customers’ needs and wants, and ensuring they have a positive experience, is now largely informed by data with tech-driven tools becoming the standard. The SaaS market for customer relationship management and customer success is continuing to grow as companies have realized that focusing on customer retention and satisfaction is a key part of surviving and thriving in challenging times. It means this space is continuing to impress with new innovations and tech developments.
Bringing customer success software into the era of AI, Velaris has just raised €4.7 million and is set to launch a ML layer to its platform and expand across Europe.
Funding details
This fresh investment was led by Octopus Ventures and included VCs, Zaka and Fintech 365.
It’s an impressive seed round figure, not least given the fact that Velaris was only founded in May 2021, showing strong promise and confidence in the platform.
Dilanka Kalutota, Co-Founder commented: “We are incredibly excited to have raised this capital. The seed round will enable us to launch our intelligence layer and gain a unique position within the market to be the first AI-led Customer Success platform. Velaris will serve the entire organization enabling horizontal growth in other teams and becoming the single source of truth for customer data.”
AI-driven customer success
Based in London and Madrid, Velaris is certainly disrupting the customer success market, designed by the founders, Dilanka Kalutota and José Fernández-Castaño, to fill a specific market gap.
Using data is increasingly the norm for sales and marketing teams, but for the customer success cohort, it hasn’t been leveraged to its full power just yet. Velaris aims to tackle this alongside additional challenges, including bringing customer data into one single platform to manage a customer’s different touch points, addressing a lack of intelligence to impact NRR and providing customer success teams with advanced reporting and execution capabilities.
Unlike some legacy predecessors and contemporaries also in the space, Velaris concentrates on a frictionless UX to encourage the use of customer experience data that will ultimately contribute to running a better company. This includes flexible reporting that incorporates intelligence with multiple data streams such as product, revenue and performance within the dashboard.
As we enter into yet more uncertain times, customer satisfaction will prove critical for business survival. It’s a hard lesson that was learnt during the pandemic. Retaining and expanding existing customers – as opposed to focusing on new sales – should be the number one priority as budgets are being cut and growth starts slowing down.
Co-Founder José Fernández-Castaño commented: “Understanding this economic landscape, Customer Success teams are uniquely positioned to help their companies weather the downturn through retention and expansion of existing revenues. We’re thrilled to now enable CS teams with a truly innovative and game-changing solution. With Octopus Ventures’ belief in Velaris, we’re able to democratize customer experience data and empower CS teams to have a greater impact across the company.”
Anuj Sharma, Head of Customer Success at Vector.ai said: “Velaris has successfully restructured the way we work and interact with our customers. We previously lacked any smooth integration or real visibility into our customers’ many, many data points, which ultimately meant that our understanding of them wasn’t where it needed to be. Velaris removed previously siloed information, gave us flexibility for tailored reporting on this now easily accessible data and made it uncomplicated to use from the start. We’ve seen the change in performance already and couldn’t be more impressed and happy with the switch we made.”
The investment will be used to build a Machine Learning-led layer to Velaris’ platform enabling B2B tech companies to wholly understand their customers, deepen the relationship, and retain and expand their business with them through data-driven decisions. Velaris will also use this capital to develop R&D, Product and Go-To-Market teams in both London and Madrid, adding to their existing hub in Sri Lanka.
Conor Scanlan, Investor at Octopus Ventures commented: “Octopus Ventures backs the people and ideas that are changing the world, and Velaris is exactly that. The brilliant people who make up the Velaris team, combined with their hyper focus on user experience and impacting NRR are already making them a leader. The addition of machine-led intelligence will alter the customer success space entirely, not to mention the tech businesses they’re supporting. We were impressed by the team’s ability to build such a powerful product in under a year and are delighted to be a part of this holistic and data-driven step change”.
