Copenhagen-based Growblocks is on a mission to help companies unlock their revenue potential with enhanced data insights and forecasting. The startup has just secured €6 million as demand picks up.
For any company, having a clear growth plan is a fundamental part of business. Revenue planning and execution inform a compy’s growth trajectory, inform decisions, and form part of reviews and performance tracking.
Revenue planning is something that you would expect needs pinpoint accuracy and data-driven insights – after all, it’s a high-level part of the entire organisations functioning. But the reality is that currently most companies focus on top-down targets and rationalize decisions based on assumptions and goals. There are currently few tools available that can help make informed revenue goals and make the process more efficient.
Existing tools tend to cater towards finance teams, helping them to control costs, but fail to actually help with revenue planning. It was this pain point that pushed Toni Hohlbein (a former Chief Revenue Officer of Falcon.io and Planday), Olafur Palsson (previously COO at Templafy), and Andrew Dahl (already VP of Product at Falcon.io, CPO at Raffle) to launch Growblocks. Now, the Danish team has secured new funding for its revenue planning & execution platform.
Funding details
- €6 million raised in a Seed round
- It was led by Project A Ventures with participation from Headline
- Angel investors include Ulrik Bo Larsen (founder of Falcon.io and Toni, Olafur, and Andrew’s former boss), Dave Kellogg, Chris Schagen (Contentful), and Pieterjan Bouten (Showpad).
Founded in 2021, Growblocks aims to help companies unlock their revenue potential. Its platform puts a company’s real-time data funnel to work to create a robust bottom-up revenue plan – taking a completely new approach to the existing top-down approach.
Toni Hohlbein, CEO and co-founder of Growblocks: “Revenue planning and execution are completely broken in today’s B2B Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Companies often focus on their top-down targets and rationalize their decisions based on assumptions and goals rather than real data. We can all see the consequences of this every other day in the news when a new round of layoffs is announced.”
Growblocks’ platform offers a solution to what the founders see as a broken approach to revenue planning – one that is data-driven and more accurate. Currently, many companies rely on massive excel sheets that are error-prone and difficult to update as the amount of data sources grows. While the cost side enjoys established standards and clear accounting regulations, the revenue side is neglected, with churn, customer lifetime value, and acquisition costs often calculated arbitrarily and based on abstract growth goals. Growblocks instead claim to bring clarity and more revenue comprehension to the process.
Toni: “Simply put: Companies often don’t really understand how their revenues are created, nor the actual costs of revenue creation. Relying solely on budgets and business targets without accounting for segments, markets, and people means that when the wind changes and things no longer go to plan, it’s incredibly hard to know where and when to intervene to generate the most impact.”
The platform can be used by commercial teams to create predictable revenue plans, conduct quarterly business reviews, and track performance against targets and initiatives. It shows the baseline of what a business will achieve which means revenue teams can then create and compare different scenarios in order to reach desired growth numbers using accurate go-to-market data. Based on the chosen scenario, the revenue plan is created and executed in terms of tracking, making corrections, and reporting.
“Every business needs a full-funnel operational model for their revenue. Growblocks’ operating model connects to all systems to visualize the entire funnel from traffic to churn. It enables businesses to predict where their revenue is coming from and gives them the ability to play out all possible scenarios ensuring they make the best decisions possible at every turn. When we were startup operators, we would have loved a tool that connected the planning of growth with the reality of driving it. As founders, we built it.”
Growblocks’ platform can also be useful to sales, marketing and customer success teams to check budget achievability, build project and hiring scenarios to support the revenue target, adjust resource allocation to optimize, and improve customer acquisition cost payback.
Sam Cash, Partner at Project A: “Strategic planning from a cost perspective has severe limitations for SaaS companies that are implementing operating plans. Most of these plans are not baked against actual operating data, and silos exacerbate this problem. Growblocks is mission control for revenue professionals and is solving this issue with a number of best-in-class companies. We’re delighted to be investing and working alongside the Growblocks team.”
The Copenhagen-born company believes in sustainable growth and wants to provide that to its customers. It’s been taking the same approach itself, monetizing from day 1 and since progressing into a fully coded software solution. Companies like Dixa, Blinkist, and Lokalise are already using the platform.
Emīls Pauls Eglītis, RevOps Insights manager at localization platform Lokalise: “Before, we just put money in a black box and see what came out of the other end. Now we can better understand where to invest and how it will turn out”
Now, with this new funding, the startup will be able to continue growing and help more teams plan and execute revenue potential.
Jonathan Becker, Partner at Headline: “It’s not uncommon to see great companies struggle to turn raised capital into actual revenue growth. Almost anyone can plan, but translating those plans into actionable steps is very hard. There is a massive demand for modern treasury management solutions. Among them, Growblocks is the only one that makes full use of a company’s data sources to build scenarios of the project and hiring plans that support revenue targets.”
