German startup Notch, unveiled its buyer enablement solution aimed at streamlining B2B sales while also announcing a €1.1 million pre-Seed funding round led by investors HTGF, WestTech Ventures, APX, and several prominent angel investors like Oliver Manojlovic (VP Sales at Personio), Sebastian Johnston (Founding Partner La Famiglia), Sebastian Haas (Co-Founder of Talen.One), Christoph Zöller (Co-Founder of Instaffo), Zou Yang (Co-Founder of GoTiger), Elias Russezki (Co-Founder of deltamethod), and Alexander Eitner (Co-Founder of MILES).
Hamburg-based Notch is defining an emerging B2B SaaS category of buyer enablement. In the world of SaaS, revenue tech stands out as the largest category, boasting impressive growth over the years with unicorns like Outreach or Hubspot. Now a shift is on the horizon that may rekindle interest in this sector and unlock a new growth wave. Born from the realization that the leading sales tools focus almost entirely on the sales team, often neglecting the buyer in the process the new category of buyer enablement is sprouting with increasing numbers of teams and investors investing.
This evolution is creating ripples among the current sales tech players as established sales players want to keep up, and mergers and acquisitions are booming around buyer-seller collaboration solutions. A batch of startups rose up to address this use case and in under six months, Alphas came in and swooped up the market: E.g.: Clari acquired DealPoint, Outreach acquired Sameplan; People.AI acquired Close Plan; MindTickle acquired Enable.us. Voila – in under six months, 60% of the market was acquired.
Jörg Rheinboldt, Managing Director at APX and General Partner at HEARTFELT_, shares: “We are excited about the emerging category of buyer enablement tools, and particularly impressed by Notch’s approach. We believe that solutions will be driven by buyer-seller collaboration, aimed at assisting buyers in making informed decisions. The unique challenge in B2B sales is that, unlike the consumer sector, each deal follows a very individual process, which traditional project management tools struggle to handle. We think that Notch, with its modular UI approach inspired by a new generation of tools, has crafted a solution that perfectly addresses this problem.”
At the core of the Notch platform is a modular workspace that allows revenue teams to effectively collaborate with their buyers during the entire sales process. This reduces the need for multiple tools and minimizes email clutter. With Notch, buyers and sellers can share sales documents and clarify the next steps, resulting in a faster, more transparent sales process for both parties and a premium B2B buying experience.
Founded in 2021, Notch integrates with many existing sales tools, like Hubspot and embeds most modern tools like Typeform, Loom, Pitch. A part of the new funding will be directed towards expanding these integrations, as Notch strives to increase its market share. Looking to the future, the team at Notch plans to focus on white-labeling their workspace for sales teams and covering additional touchpoints during the buying journey like transactions and subscriptions.
Currently, Notch is focusing on SaaS revenue teams and has already begun collaborations with several businesses, including growth companies in the DACH region, such as bookingkit, Akeneo, and PAQATO.
