Berlin-based Minoa, developers of software-driven value and pricing management solutions for more effective enterprise SaaS sales, today announced the close of an over-subscribed €2.5 million pre-seed funding round led by 468 Capital with participation from Mischief (Plaid founder Zach Perret), AirAngels (Podcaster Lenny Rachitsky), Alumni Ventures and Fidi Ventures. Angel investors participating included Front founder Mathilde Collin, DocSend founder Russ Heddleston and senior executives from Amazon, AirBnb and Salesforce.
The funding will be used to expand the team in San Francisco. With this in mind, Minoa is looking for a founding engineer (full-stack engineer) and a founding UX/UI designer.
“Enterprises will spend nearly $200 billion on SaaS this year but vendors lack the necessary software-driven tools to really understand their customers’ needs,” says Max Elster, co-founder and CEO of Minoa. “We’ve created solutions that involve buyers and champions on the customer side directly in the sales process. SaaS sales are only getting harder. Taking a more collaborative approach to enterprise sales helps SaaS companies not only better understand customers but also better optimize pricing.”
Market research firm Gartner predicts SaaS spend in the enterprise will rise to $195 billion in 2023, up 17% from $167 billion in 2022. SaaS overall represents about a third of total cloud spend, according to Gartner.
“We believe that the customer experience must come first in SaaS, especially in sales,” says Richard Einhorn, co-founder and CTO of Minoa. “But there are more and more challenges in SaaS sales at a time when many buyer budgets are constrained, CFO s are taking a harder look at the multiplication of vendors throughout their companies, and more and more SaaS sales cycles require a lot of interactions. So successful enterprise SaaS sales requires a new collaborative approach with your customers and prospects.”
Founded in 2023, Minoa’s innovative solutions are easy and intuitive for both salespeople and buyers or prospects to use. In the process, Minoa helps SaaS companies gain better insights into their customers’ and prospects’ willingness to pay through a collaborative sales process that includes sharing of ROI calculators and value cases. Collaborative value selling doesn’t stop when the deal is signed so Minoa works with customers to measure value realization and support renewal conversations.
“We were very impressed by the founding team and their profound understanding of the SaaS sales process. Particularly with respect to where the sales cycle breaks when closing new sales or renewals and optimizing prices,” says Philipp Seifert, partner at 468 Capital. “They’ve built a clever, collaborative offering for value management that customers love to use, and we believe that the solution is already compelling enough to challenge even the biggest incumbent CRM vendors today.”
