say tap, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to attach buyers and sellers of enterprise software, today announced that it has raised $6.8 million in seed funding. The company is constructing the primary AI-driven marketplace for enterprise software procurement and goals to resolve problems for each overwhelmed technology managers and unknown software vendors seeking to fill their sales pipelines.
“What we’re doing with Sagetap is constructing the primary AI-driven marketplace that connects buyers and sellers of enterprise software,” Sahil Khanna, CEO and co-founder of Sagetap, said in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. “More than procurement, I’d call this a discovery.”
Resolving pain points for software buyers and sellers
The idea for Sagetap arose from Khanna and his co-founder's experiences at previous enterprise software firms. Up to 50% of those startups' spending went toward sales and marketing, but old-fashioned tactics like cold emails and LinkedIn messages were yielding diminishing returns.
“This is cutting-edge technology they’re developing, but the best way they make sales hasn’t modified in many years,” Khanna said. “It seemed inevitable that a marketplace like Uber and Airbnb would emerge for enterprise software.”
On Sagetap's platform, technology managers anonymously create profiles with details about their technology stack, cloud infrastructure, initiatives and success criteria. Sagetap's AI-powered advice engine then matches them with providers deemed most credible and relevant. The buyers and sellers meet in 30-minute Zoom introductory meetings on Sagetap, with the client's identity kept secret.
“I can now always explore many recent modern technologies with confidence,” Khanna said of the platform’s approach. “But I won’t be sold if I don’t wish to be sold.”
Check providers and get noticed early
Sagetap said it has a database of 14,000 software providers backed by leading enterprise capital firms. It vets providers using a mix of publicly available information and “proprietary anonymized data” obtained from interactions on its platform. To turn into lively customers who can launch campaigns through Sagetap, providers must pass an extra verification process.
On the opposite side of the market, Sagetap says there are over 5,000 “verified technology managers” using its platform, including firms like Nvidia, JP Morgan And Airbnb. Some have told the startup that Sagetap has turn into their preferred method to meet recent vendors.
“They stop responding to cold emails or their LinkedIn,” Khanna told VentureBeat. “You meet providers through Sagetap. It’s their preferred medium.”
Consumerized procurement of enterprise software
To differentiate itself from established industry analysts like Gartner, Sagetap offers a more targeted service powered by AI and based on direct, anonymous interactions between buyers and sellers. Buyers “gain a deep understanding of every individual buyer, their organization, their environment, their needs and pain points and recommend products that may actually address them,” Khanna said.
But Sagetap faces the challenge of constructing liquidity and achieving critical mass on each side of its market. To gain traction, the corporate must persuade buyers that its AI can uncover worthwhile recent entrants and persuade sellers that it could actually connect them with the fitting decision makers to fill their pipelines.
The startup's seed funding round was led by NFX, with participation from Uncorlated Ventures and Emergent Ventures. Notably, Sagetap said $1 million of the funding round got here from its own customers, including executives from Oracle, Dell and SecureFrame, an indication of confidence in its platform's early market launch.
If Sagetap's vision becomes a reality, it could further speed up the consumerization of enterprise software purchasing, allowing individual developers and business units to quickly obtain the tools they need. But it's still early. The enterprise has long proven immune to change, and software procurement stays a fancy entity, still often mediated through analytics firms, RFPs, proofs of concepts, and vendor bakeoffs.
Sagetap must prove that an AI algorithm can reliably replace this process. But with $6.8 million in recent funding, the corporate a minimum of has some headroom to attempt to crack the code on modernizing software procurement for buyers and sellers alike.
