Today, the California-based RocketLanea SaaS startup that simplifies the delivery of after-sales services to businesses, announced that it has raised $24 million in a Series B funding round led by 8VC, Matrix Partners India and Nexus Venture Partners.
This investment brings RocketLane's total capital raised to $45 million and can be used strategically to further develop the corporate's platform right into a full-fledged AI-powered offering. The move is in step with a worldwide trend of SaaS providers integrating AI into their products in other ways to satisfy increasing customer demands.
“We are constructing an AI layer to enrich project execution teams and improve efficiency. RocketLane is expanding its offerings upstream and downstream to enable seamless execution and customer collaboration at every a part of the client journey,” Srikrishnan Ganesan, the corporate's co-founder and CEO, told VentureBeat.
What does RocketLane should offer?
When an organization wins a customer, the battle is barely half won. They must construct on that contract and deliver services accordingly. This requires timely execution and ongoing collaboration with the client to maintain them informed and ensure they’ve the most effective experience.
Most teams today use a mixture of various tools to run their post-sales workflows. The approach works, however the siloed nature of the tools can result in inaccurate reporting on project health, delays, and a general lack of insight into execution – leading to a subpar delivery experience and sometimes even attrition. RocketLane, founded in 2020, solves exactly this problem.
At its core, the corporate provides enterprises with an all-in-one service delivery platform that delivers purpose-built experiences to extend transparency and accountability across customers and internal teams, while helping the latter anticipate issues and get it right each time.
“On one hand, this includes project-related features like project management (offered by tools like Coda and Asana), document collaboration, forms, customer satisfaction surveys, chat, meeting notes, status updates, and email templates. On the opposite hand, this includes service-related features like time tracking, resource capability management, tariffs, project financials, and reporting,” Ganesan told VentureBeat. He said the platform has more native features than every other software within the space.
In the following step of this work, the corporate will now use the newly raised funds to construct an AI layer for its product, specializing in 4 key areas: operations, project delivery, governance and insights.
As for operations, Ganesan said RocketLane has began adopting AI. Currently, the technology helps teams optimize resource management by allowing users to staff a project with a single click based on the required skills, availability, and more parameters. They may even see the projected utilization, margins of a project, etc. in the sunshine of the business objective (whether it’s to optimize margins or balance the team's workload).
“When it involves project delivery, we attempt to integrate AI-powered automations into project activities, reminiscent of creating handover documents, meeting notes, and follow-up emails. These documents and communication templates can include AI-powered smart sections which are routinely populated from call recordings, reducing the manual effort required of project managers and consultants,” explained Ganesan.
To drive governance, RocketLane will use AI to discover risks in projects and uncover deviations from game plans for various kinds of meetings or activities. For example, management could possibly be routinely notified if a key stakeholder on the service team fails to indicate up for consecutive customer meetings or misses key deliverables when working with customers. To streamline insights, a Copilot interface can be created that enables users to run queries in plain English and get accurate data on their post-sale KPIs and execution patterns.
“Why are my project margins low within the enterprise segment? What is the median time to go live within the last quarter? AI will make it easy for you to seek out the answers you would like. You will not need pre-built dashboards and reports to get the data you would like on the fly,” Ganesan noted.
Over 500 corporate customers
With these recent AI features, RocketLane goals to make its offering more lucrative and attract more paying customers. Ganesan says the corporate is on a winning streak, having grown its revenue greater than threefold annually over the past two years and greater than 12fold since its last funding round in January 2022.
Currently, RocketLane counts greater than 500 firms as its customers. These include some large, service and implementation intensive technology firms reminiscent of Live Person, Icertis, Uniphore, Moveworks, Fivetran, Salesloft and Zenoti. Flatfile, which offers intelligent APIs for file-based data import, was in a position to achieve this by utilizing RocketLane, reducing their customers' go-live time by 70%.
“Our customers are more engaged than ever before. RocketLane's customer portal gives them real-time visibility into the status of their onboarding project. They can complete tasks on time because they know exactly what they should do, and in addition contact us immediately via built-in chat to speak more effectively,” said Becca Weiss, the corporate's senior director of CS and implementations, in a press release.
In addition to AI capabilities, RocketLane will use the funding to rent talent across all departments and double down on its community-first efforts through events and content. In the approaching months, the corporate may even launch a dynamic, customer-facing portal, Ganesan said.
