San Ramon, CA—Feb. 17, 2022—First came software licenses. Then SaaS subscriptions. Now comes “post-subscription SaaS”: a more dynamic way to sell software, with deals that change and evolve based on the customer’s needs. Think flexible discounts or consumption-based pricing or contracts that ramp up over time with additional seats and features. It’s the cloud, after all. Why shouldn’t a SaaS deal be as innovative as SaaS itself?
The problem is, you can’t make a deal you can’t quote or bill. Traditional quoting and billing solutions were designed for simple invoices with the same deliverables, at the same price, every billing period. They make it hard for sales teams to offer flexible terms, and for finance to invoice the right amount. As a result, the business is slow to close deals and recognize revenue — if the deals come through at all.
Those are the problems Subskribe was built to solve, launching today with $18.4M in seed and Series A funding from 8VC (which led the A round) and Slow Ventures (which led the seed).
Founded by billing and payment veterans from Zuora, Okta, Netflix and Google, Subskribe is the world’s first adaptive quoting and billing platform for modern SaaS.
Until now, quote-to-revenue solutions have suffered from two key flaws. First, many are slapped together from different systems, which makes them error-prone, expensive to integrate and difficult to reconcile. Second, they are built around static sales orders that aren’t designed to change. Even when they claim to support dynamic deals, their underlying architecture makes them clumsy and unreliable.
Subskribe is different. It’s an adaptive quote-to-revenue system built around orders that can change over time, down to the individual line item. Each part of Subskribe, from quoting to billing, refers to the same repository of dynamic orders — the same source of truth — so it’s a totally unified experience from proposal to revenue. No silos. No need for finance to puzzle over how much to bill.
“With most SaaS companies, their Achilles heel is the quote-to-revenue process. It makes everything hard. It’s hard to set up a complex quote. It’s hard to reconcile quotes and invoices. It’s hard to bill subscriptions and one-off services. Subskribe makes all those hard things easy. It enables businesses to design deals that make sense for them, not their software. Our customers are winning more business and growing their top-line revenue faster than ever before,” said Subskribe CEO Durga Pandey.
“Subskribe has been a great partner, enabling us to quickly operationalize pay-as-you-go pricing for our new SmallID offering. As BigID continues to scale, the ability to provide on-demand, consumption-based subscriptions is a fantastic compliment to our Enterprise offerings,” said Tom Murtaugh, VP, GTM operations at BigID.
Subskribe provides a consumer-grade experience with enterprise capabilities, including a unified and highly scalable architecture, a modern API-first design and powerful low/no-code customization. Best-in class features include:
- Advanced usage-based billing
- Industry-leading support for quoting and billing ramp-up subscriptions
- Zero reconciliation between quotes/orders and invoices
- Order-based invoicing to support ASC 606
- Unified product catalog across quoting and billing
- Predefined templates for jumpstarting setup
- Pre-built integrations with Salesforce, Slack, Avalara, Docusign and many more.
“Subskribe is entirely transforming the way SaaS companies do business; the way their proprietary software is changing the process of subscription billing for the use of software is revolutionary. They are a perfect example of how 8VC likes to both back and build companies that completely modernize entire sectors and I am thrilled to watch this talented team build the software billing technology company of the future,” said 8VC founding partner Alex Kolicich.
“Subskribe has quickly made a big impact in a fragmented $8B market that’s crying out for disruption,” said Sam Lessin, managing director at Slow Ventures. “Despite many attempts, neither the big incumbents nor newer startups have nailed the post-subscription SaaS problem the way Subskribe has. It’s a real testament to the experience of their leadership and the excellence of their design and engineering teams. There’s no limit to where Subskribe can go from here.”
In addition to 8VC and Slow Ventures, Subskribe’s investors include senior finance and operations executives at companies including Amplitude, Asana, Coupa, Dialpad, Okta, Plaid and UIPath. Subskribe’s cofounders include former Zuora engineering director Yibin Guo and former Okta business technology director Prakash Raina.
For more information or to schedule a demo, visit Subskribe’s website here.
About Subskribe
Subskribe is the adaptive quoting and billing platform for modern SaaS companies. Totally unified. No silos. Zero reconciliation, from order to revenue. Designed in collaboration with some of the world’s leading SaaS companies, Subskribe helps businesses maximize revenue with innovative deal structures like ramp-up engagements, mid-term upsells and flexible discounts. The result is faster time-to-market, increased top-line growth and massive operational savings. Headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, Subskribe is backed by venture firms including 8VC and Slow Ventures. For more information, visit www.subskribe.com.
About 8VC
8VC is a leading technology investment firm, investing in visionary teams and backing industry-transforming companies. The partners have a proven track-record as founders, engineers, and operators of successful companies including Palantir, Addepar, Affinity and OpenGov, amongst others. 8VC was founded in 2012 and manages $3.6 billion in committed capital. The firm invests primarily in smart enterprise platforms across industries including financial services, healthcare, logistics, Bio-IT, and others. For more information, please visit http://8VC.com
About Slow Ventures
Slow Ventures is an early-stage focused Venture Capital firm based out of San Francisco and Boston. Slow is generalist and invests in early stage teams and ideas ranging from Social Networking to Consumer Brands to SaaS, and Crypto. Slow believes — and has seen proven time and again — that great things frequently take time to inflect, and believes that their number-one job is to back great founders on their journey. In the last decade, Slow has invested in the earliest rounds of over 300 companies.
