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There could be more to the Salesforce+ video streaming service than meets the eye
When Salesforce announced its new business video streaming service called Salesforce+ this week, everyone had a reaction. While not all of it was positive, some company watchers also wondered if there was more to this announcement than meets the eye.
If you look closely, the new initiative suggests that Salesforce wants to take a bite out of LinkedIn and other SaaS content platforms and publishers. The video streaming service could be a launch point for a broader content platform, where its partners are producing their own content and using Salesforce+ infrastructure to help them advertise to and cultivate their own customers.
The video streaming service could be a launch point for a broader content platform, where its partners are producing their own content and using Salesforce+ infrastructure to help them advertise to and cultivate their own customers.
The company has, after all, done exactly this sort of thing with its online marketplaces and industry events to great success. Salesforce generated almost $6 billion in its most recent quarterly earnings report. That mostly comes from selling its sales, marketing and service software, not any kind of content production, but it has lots of experience putting on Dreamforce, its massive annual customer event, as well as smaller events throughout the year around the world.
On its face, Salesforce+ is a giant, ambitious and quite expensive content marketing play. The company reportedly has hired a large professional staff to produce and manage the content, and built a broadcasting and production studio designed to produce quality shows in-house. It believes that by launching with content from Dreamforce, its highly successful customer conference, attended by tens of thousands people every year pre-pandemic, it can prime the viewing pump and build audience momentum that way, perhaps even using celebrities as it often does at its events to drive audience. It is less clear about the long-term business goals.
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Disaster recovery can be an effective way to ease into the cloud
Operating in the cloud is soon going to be a reality for many businesses whether they like it or not. Points of contention with this shift often arise from unfamiliarity and discomfort with cloud operations. However, cloud migrations don’t have to be a full lift and shift.
Instead, leaders unfamiliar with the cloud should start by moving over their disaster recovery program to the cloud, which helps to gain familiarity and understanding before a full migration of production workloads.
What is DRaaS?
Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is cloud-based disaster recovery delivered as a service to organizations in a self-service, partially managed or fully managed service model. The agility of DR in the cloud affords businesses a geographically diverse location to failover operations and run as close to normal as possible following a disruptive event. DRaaS emphasizes speed of recovery so that this failover is as seamless as possible. Plus, technology teams can offload some of the more burdensome aspects of maintaining and testing their disaster recovery.
When it comes to disaster recovery testing, allow for extra time to let your IT staff learn the ins and outs of the cloud environment.
DRaaS is a perfect candidate for a first step into the cloud for five main reasons:
- Using DRaaS helps leaders get accustomed to the ins and outs of cloud before conducting a full production shift.
- Testing cycles of the DRaaS solution allows IT teams to see firsthand how their applications will operate in a cloud environment, enabling them to identify the applications that will need a full or partial refactor before migrating to the cloud.
- With DRaaS, technology leaders can demonstrate an early win in the cloud without risking full production.
- DRaaS success helps gain full buy-in from stakeholders, board members and executives.
- The replication tools that DRaaS uses are sometimes the same tools used to migrate workloads for production environments — this helps the technology team practice their cloud migration strategy.
Steps to start your DRaaS journey to the cloud
Define your strategy
Do your research to determine if DRaaS is right for you given your long-term organizational goals. You don’t want to start down a path to one cloud environment if that cloud isn’t aligned with your company’s objectives, both for the short and long term. Having cross-functional conversations among business units and with company executives will assist in defining and iterating your strategy.
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E-commerce-as-a-service platform Cart.com picks up $98M to give brands scaling tools
Cart.com, a Houston-based company providing end-to-end e-commerce services, brought in its third funding round this year, this time a $98 million Series B round to bring its total funding to $143 million.
Oak HC/FT led the new round of funding and was joined by PayPal Ventures, Clearco, G9 Ventures, Mercury Fund, Valedor Partners and Arsenal Growth. Strategic investors in the Series B include Heyday CEO Sebastian Rymarz and Casper CEO Philip Krim. This new round follows a $25 million Series A round, led by Mercury and Arsenal in July, and a $20 million seed round from Bearing Ventures.
Cart.com CEO Omair Tariq, who was previously an executive at Home Depot and COO of Blinds.com, co-founded the company in September 2020 with Jim Jacobson, former CEO of RTIC Outdoors.
Tariq told TechCrunch that the company provides software, services and infrastructure to businesses so they can scale online. Cart.com is taking the best parts of selling direct-to-consumer on marketplaces like Amazon and Shopify to create value for brands. Tariq said he is pioneering the term “e-commerce-as-a-service” to bring together under one platform a suite of business tools like storefront software, marketing, fulfillment, payments and customer service.
“We see the power of having an interconnected platform,” Tariq said. “There also needs to be a hybrid between selling direct-to-consumer and on Amazon and Shopify for companies that don’t have the money to pay for a percentage of their sales and receive no access to customers or data, and needing 20 different plug-ins that are not connected.”
Cart.com went after the new funding after seeing validation of its idea: brands coming to them wanting more products and services, which led to acquisitions. The company has acquired seven companies so far, including — AmeriCommerce, Spacecraft Brands and, more recently, DuMont Project and Sauceda Industries. Tariq is planning for another three or four by the end of the year.
In addition, it received inbound interest from strategic investors, like Oak and PayPal, which Tariq said was going to enable the company “to be more successful faster.”
Allen Miller, principal at Oak HC/FT, said after spending time with Tariq to understand his vision about Cart.com’s software, payments and services, he felt that the company was doing something that didn’t exist in today’s commerce infrastructure.
He said that Cart.com is well positioned to help companies, like those with $1 million in sales, stay focused on growing the business while Cart.com stitches together all of the tools for them to operate in the background.
“It’s a unique offering to merchants that has a high value proposition,” Miller said. “The vision and drive that Omair and Jim have, along with an inspiring mission they want to achieve — to be brand-centric and help the next generation of merchants. These guys also have a good playbook on finding companies and teams to acquire, as well as handling the post M&A to have everyone on one platform.”
The new financing will enable Cart.com to further invest in technology development and to increase headcount by at least 15 times, with plans to go from fewer than two dozen employees to more than 300 team members by the end of the year. The company has nearly 70 jobs posted on its website for positions in engineering, technology, digital marketing and e-commerce. Tariq also expects half of the funds to go toward more acquisitions.
Cart.com currently serves over 2,000 e-commerce brands, including GNC, Haymaker Coffee and KeHE, and processes more than $700 million in gross merchandise value per year. The company saw revenue increase 400% since the platform’s launch in November.
In addition, the company has nine fulfillment centers across the country, and is increasing its access to reach 80% of the U.S. population with two-day shipping, Tariq added.
“We are giving the power back to brands by giving them what they need to operate e-commerce,” he said. “There are still a few pieces to fill in so brands have a unified experience, but with us, they can add fulfilment, marketing or customer conversion tools with the click of a couple of buttons.”
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Bite Ninja scoops up pre-seed funding to reimagine restaurant working environments
Will Clem knows all too well about restaurant workers not showing up for a shift. At least one person would have car trouble or need to stay home with sick children, and it became a common occurrence on the weekends for the co-founder of Memphis Meats and owner of Baby Jacks BBQ in Memphis.
Needing to fill a shift one Friday night, Clem decided to prop his laptop in the drive-thru lane of one of his restaurants and took orders from home by remoting into the system. No one noticed that he wasn’t actually taking orders from the kitchen itself. Thus came the idea for Bite Ninja, a remote hiring technology platform for restaurants.
Clem connected with Orin Wilson to start the company in 2020 and worked for a year on the technology before launching it in March. Today, the company announced $675,000 in pre-seed funding led by Y Combinator, AgFunder and Manta Ray.
With many restaurants unable to find workers as a result of the global pandemic, Clem and Wilson wanted to build a technology that would enable restaurants to go back to normal operating hours, or even reopen their stores. At the same time, the workers, or “Ninjas” as they are referred to, can work the drive-thru or counter for a lunch or dinner rush shift from home, but appear on-screen to customers via menu boards, Wilson said.
Bite Ninja drive-thru. Image Credits: Bite Ninja
“When a restaurant is slammed, you need an army of people to work the rush, but it is not reasonable to ask them to get in their uniform and get in their cars, last-minute, to clock in for just an hour or two,” he added. “They have control of their schedule and can pick the right shift for them. It is so popular that we typically have five to 10 people bidding on each shift.”
Bite Ninja is providing a better experience and reaches potential workers that would not necessarily have an interest in performing fast food work. Many of the 3,000 Ninjas already working with the company are stay-at-home moms and retirees with customer service experience, but who can’t physically come into a store, Clem said. In addition, the company is working with the Nurse-Family Partnership to help women get back into the workforce.
The company initially ran three pilot programs and has expanded services to curbside and front cashier stations. The funding will enable Bite Ninja to scale initiatives, hire additional software engineers and prepare for a rollout at national food chains.
Since launching earlier this year, Bite Ninja is already being used in a few thousand stores.
Manuel Gonzalez, partner at AgFunder, said restaurants are a big part of entrepreneurship, but the pandemic forced more than 110,000 of them out of business.
“Bite Ninja’s solution is one that decreases costs to restaurant owners, but increases the income of the worker,” he said. “It also helps entrepreneurs and the community because restaurants are important for economic, cultural, community and social points of view.”
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Salesforce wants Salesforce+ to be the Netflix of biz content
Salesforce just closed a $28 billion mega-deal to buy Slack, generating significant debt along the way, but it’s not through spending big money.
Today the CRM giant announced it was taking a leap into streaming media with Salesforce+, a forthcoming digital media network with a focus on video that, in the words of the company, “will bring the magic of Dreamforce to viewers across the globe with luminary speakers.” (Whether that’s a good thing or not is in the eye of the beholder.)
Over the last year, Salesforce has watched companies struggle to quickly transform into fully digital entities. The Slack purchase is part of Salesforce’s response to the evolving market, but the company believes it can do even more with an on-demand video service providing business content around the clock.
Salesforce president and CMO Sarah Franklin said in an official post that her company has had to “reimagine how to succeed in the new digital-first world.” The answer apparently involves getting the larger Salesforce community together in a new live, and recorded video push.
In a Q&A with Colin Fleming, Salesforce’s senior vice president of Global Brand Marketing, he sees it as a way to evolve the content the company has been sharing all along. “As a result of the pandemic, we looked at the media landscape, where people are consuming content, and decided the days of white papers in a business-to-business setting were no longer interesting to people. We’re staring at a cookie-less future. And looking at the consumer world, we reflected on that for Salesforce and asked, “Why shouldn’t we be thinking about this too,” he said in the Q&A.
The company’s efforts are not small. Axios reports that there are “50 editorial leads” aboard the project to help it launch, and “hundreds of people at Salesforce currently working on Salesforce+” more broadly.
Notably Salesforce does not have near-term monetization plans for Salesforce+. The service will be free, and will not feature external advertising. Salesforce+ will launch in September in conjunction with Dreamforce and include four channels: Primetime for news and announcements, Trailblazer for training content, Customer 360 for success stories and Industry Channels for industry-specific offerings.
The company hopes that by combining the announcement with Dreamforce, it will help drive interest in what Salesforce has cooked up. After the Dreamforce push, Salesforce+ will enter into interesting territory. How much do Salesforce customers, and the larger business community, really want what the company describes as “compelling live and on-demand content for every role, industry and line of business,” and “engaging stories, thought leadership and expert advice”?
Salesforce is considered the most successful SaaS-first company in history, and as such may have an opinion that people are interested in hearing. In its most recent quarterly earnings report in May, the company disclosed $5.96 billion in revenue, up 23% compared to the year-ago quarter, putting it close to a $25 billion run rate. The company also generates lots of cash. But being cash-rich doesn’t absolve the question of whether this new streaming effort will prove to be a money pit, costing buckets of cash to produce with limited returns.
The service sounds a bit like your LinkedIn feed brought to life, but in video form. At the very least, it’s probably the largest content marketing scheme of all time, but can it ever pay for itself either as a business unit or through some other monetization plans (like advertising) down the road?
Brent Leary, founder and principal analyst at CRM essentials, says that he could see Salesforce eyeing advertising revenue with this venture and having it all tie into the Salesforce platform. “A customer could sponsor a show, advertise a show or possibly collaborate on a show… and have leads generated from the show directly tied to the activity from those options while tracking ROI, and it’s all done on one platform. And the content lives on with ads living on with them,” Leary told TechCrunch.
Whether that’s the ultimate goal of this venture remains to be seen, but Salesforce has proven that there is market appetite for Dreamforce content at least in the physical world, with over a hundred thousand people involved in 2019, the last time the company was able to hold a live event. While the pandemic shifted most traditional conference activity into the digital realm, making Dreamforce and related types of content available year-round in video format makes some sense in that context.
Precisely how the company will justify the sizable addition to its marketing budget will be interesting; measuring ROI from video products is not entirely straightforward when it is not monetized directly. And sooner or later it will have to have some direct or indirect impact on the business or face questions from shareholders on the purpose of the venture.
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Salesforce’s Kathy Baxter is coming to TC Sessions: SaaS to talk AI
As the use of AI has grown and developed over the last several years, companies like Salesforce have tried to tap into it to improve their software and help customers operate faster and more efficiently. Kathy Baxter, principal architect for the ethical AI practice at Salesforce, will be joining us at TechCrunch Sessions: SaaS on October 27th to talk about the impact of AI on SaaS.
Baxter, who has more than 20 years of experience as a software architect, joined Salesforce in 2017 after more than a decade at Google in a similar role. We’re going to tap into her expertise on a panel discussing AI’s growing role in software.
Salesforce was one of the earlier SaaS adherents to AI, announcing its artificial intelligence tooling, which the company dubbed Einstein, in 2016. While the positioning makes it sound like a product, it’s actually much more than a single entity. It’s a platform component, which the various pieces of the Salesforce platform can tap into to take advantage of various types of AI to help improve the user experience.
That could involve feeding information to customer service reps on Service Cloud to make the call move along more efficiently, helping salespeople find the customers most likely to close a deal soon in the Sales Cloud or helping marketing understand the optimal time to send an email in the Marketing Cloud.
The company began building out its AI tooling early on with the help of 175 data scientists and has been expanding on that initial idea since. Other companies, both startups and established companies like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft, have continued to build AI into their platforms as Salesforce has. Today, many SaaS companies have some underlying AI built into their service.
Baxter will join us to discuss the role of AI in software today and how that helps improve the operations of the service itself, and what the implications are of using AI in your software service as it becomes a mainstream part of the SaaS development process.
In addition to our discussion with Baxter, the conference will also include Databricks’ Ali Ghodsi, UiPath’s Daniel Dines and Puppet’s Abby Kearns, as well as investors Casey Aylward and Sarah Guo, among others. We hope you’ll join us. It’s going to be a stimulating day.
Buy your pass now to save up to $100, and use CrunchMatch to make expanding your empire quick, easy and efficient. We can’t wait to see you in October!
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RentCheck raises $2.6M in seed funding to help renters get their security deposits back
We’ve all been there. (Or at least I have.)
You’re getting ready to vacate a property you’ve rented, only to be told by the landlord that you won’t be getting your security deposit back.
This happened to me the first time I ever rented a place in the late 90s. I was shocked, but more than anything, I was angry at the injustice because I knew that what the landlord claimed was not true. It was her word against mine and my roommate’s. Still, we took her to small claims court, not so much over the $800 she was trying to keep but more to prove her wrong. In the end, we won.
But it was a lot of work, and a lot of time spent. If only there was some kind of technology available to have helped us make our case.
Well, today there is. RentCheck, a startup that is out to help solve the “he said, she said” challenge in these situations with an automated property inspection platform, has recently raised $2.6 million in seed money.
Lydia Winkler and Marco Nelson started the company in mid-2019 after Winkler experienced a similar situation to mine and ended up suing her landlord in small claims court. She was working on getting her JD/MBA at Tulane University at the time.
“It was an injustice for me not to pursue it,” she told TechCrunch. “I took meticulous photos of the move-out condition of my apartment. The process took 18 months. But not everyone has the time or knowledge to fight in court.”
She then met Nelson, who had bought several properties that he ended up renting out. He had issues with security deposits too, but the opposite ones. He had to settle disputes over deposits, and found himself documenting properties’ condition at the time of move-out.
“I met Lydia and we realized we were passionate about the same problem,” Nelson recalled.
And so New Orleans-based RentCheck was born.
Image Credits: RentCheck; Co-founders Marco Nelson and Lydia Winkler
There are an estimated 48 million rental units in the U.S., with an average deposit of $1,000.
“A good chunk of that is being fought after on aggregate,” Winkler said. “And so many need that money to put down a deposit on another unit.”
To address the problem, RentCheck built a web app for property managers that they believe also benefits tenants. The company’s digital platform works by providing a way for property managers to facilitate and conduct remote, guided property inspections. For obvious reasons, the company saw increased demand upon the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, considering that the platform was automated and contactless. It saw 1,000% — mostly organic — growth in terms of the number of properties on the platform.
“What we do is, using a guided inspection process, prompt users and guide them room by room, telling them exactly what to take photos of so that floors, ceilings, windows and walls are all accounted for,” Winkler said.
Everything is done within the app so that users can’t upload photos that were previously on their camera roll “to ensure the integrity of the inspection” and that everything is time stamped. Once the inspection is complete, whoever does it signs off on it that they completed it accurately and honestly. Then the property manager can also sign off on it so both parties can agree on the move-out condition.
The company operates as a SaaS business, and charges property management companies a subscription fee based on the number of properties that they have on the RentCheck platform. They can then conduct “as many inspections as they want,” Nelson says, “whether the residents are doing them, their internal teams are doing them, or a third-party vendor, or a hybrid of the three.”
Image Credits: RentCheck/Bryce Ell Photography
The startup has attracted some large-name investors since its inception, first catching the attention of James “Jim” Coulter, the founder of TPG Capital, when the company won New Orleans Entrepreneurship Week. Coulter subsequently became one of the company’s first investors in its $1 million pre-seed round.
The company’s seed round included participation from Cox Enterprises, for its operations in the multifamily housing space, and angels such as Jim Payne, who previously sold MoPub to Twitter, and MAX to AppLovin; Ken Goldman, the former CFO of Yahoo, and who currently runs Hillspire, Eric and Wendy Schmidt’s family office; Mark Zaleski and John Kuolt of BCG Digital Ventures, and Brian Long, the founder of Attentive, who previously sold TapCommerce to Twitter. It also included institutional investors such as Irongrey, Context Ventures and Techstars.
“What we love about RentCheck is that it’s using very clever technology to automate and solve arguably the industry’s biggest problem in terms of money and time for both property managers and tenants,” said Kuolt, former managing director at BCG Digital Ventures and an early RentCheck investor. “The deposit deduction issue needs a technology-based solution, and almost everyone, at some time, has felt like they’ve been screwed over on their deposit by a landlord. When you see and use RentCheck’s solution, it makes you think: ‘Why didn’t I think of this?’ ”
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Product-led revenue startup Correlated launches with $8.3M seed
Correlated on Wednesday announced it raised $8.3 million in seed funding to launch its product-led growth platform for sales teams.
NextView Ventures and Harrison Metal co-led the round and were joined by Apollo Projects, Attentive co-founders Brian Long and Andrew Jones, Cockroach Labs co-founder Ben Darnell and Atrium’s Pete Kazanjy. The round includes funding raised last year and more recent follow-on funding from both NextView and Harrison, co-founder and CEO Tim Geisenheimer told TechCrunch.
The New York-based company was founded in 2020 by Geisenheimer and Diana Hsieh, who overlapped at TimescaleDB, and John Pena, who Geisenheimer met at Facet. In their previous roles, they saw a need to connect product data to sales tools.
While at Timescale, Geisenheimer said there were thousands of free users to talk to, and he and Hsieh built a similar version of a product-led growth platform there, but secretly wished there was something more like Correlated available.
What they saw was data across multiple tools being stored manually on spreadsheets so that actionable insights could be generated. The data would quickly become outdated. Add in that the way customers use products now is different. Traditionally, customers would not be able to use a product until they talked to the sales team. Today, customers start using products for free and either get value from it or not, but sales teams don’t have real-time data on their experience.
“Sales needs to know how customers are using the product and the right time for sales to engage based on maturity of the experience,” Geisenheimer said. “That was the missing piece of it and sales teams ended up talking to the wrong people. With Correlated, they can close more deals efficiently.”
Correlated’s technology pulls in product usage data from tools and data warehouses and connects to a management platform like Salesforce or HubSpot, stitching it together into a data graph to show how customers are using a product. For example, within a company of 200 to 500 employees, a salesperson can see the frequency employees logged in and be alerted of when the best opportunity is to make the sale.
The company has a SaaS pricing model and is already working with mid-market companies like Ally, Pulumi, ReadMe and LaunchNotes. To support its launch out of beta, Geisenheimer intends to use the new funding for hiring across functions like engineering and go-to-market. The company has 11 employees currently.
There are other product-led growth platforms out there that raised venture capital funding recently, for example, Endgame, and similarly Geisenheimer said the competition is often in-house product teams building their own systems. Correlated’s differentiator is that it has taken on that task itself and enables customers to quickly see value once they are up-and-running, he added.
David Beisel, co-founder and partner at NextView Ventures, said his firm invests in category stage companies and is currently operating out of its fourth fund, infusing business-to-business SaaS and e-commerce companies. Beisel has known Geisenheimer for nearly a decade now, having met him when NextView invested in one of Geisenheimer’s previous companies, TapCommerce.
“At the end of the day with Tim, he knows sales and the company is selling a product that has a strong founder market fit,” Beisel said. “We are moving toward a world where end-user adoption of software — not the initial engagement — is growing over time. Instead, Correlated empowers that initial sale and account expansion and that will align with where the industry is going.”
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Edtech startup bina raises $1.4M to teach 4- to 12-year-olds, launch School-as-a-Service
With the pandemic wreaking havoc amongst early years education amid school lockdowns, it’s no wonder edtech startups have piled into the space. But it has also served to highlight the abysmal nature of early years teaching: Some 40 million teachers across the globe are leaving the sector, according to the World Bank. Of the 1.5 billion primary-age children, only a few can access high-quality education, and approximately 58 million primary-age children are out of education, most of whom are girls.
So the opportunity to make a difference, using online teaching, in these very young years, is great, because classes sizes can be reduced online, and the quality of teaching improved.
This is the idea behind bina, which bills itself as a “digital primary education ecosystem”. It has now raised $1.4 million to aim at the education of 4- to 12-year-olds.
The funding round was led by Taizo Son, one of Japan’s billionaires. Other investors and advisors include Jutta Steiner, founder at Parity Technologies, the company behind Polkadot decentralized protocol, and Lord Jim Knight, ex-Minister of Education (U.K.).
Bina’s “schtick” is that it has very small online class sizes of six students (3x smaller than the OECD average).
It also boasts of “adaptive learning paths” that cover international standards; teachers with a minimum of eight years of digital teaching experience; and data-driven decision making for its pedagogical approach.
Noam Gerstein, bina’s CEO and founder said: “I’ve interviewed students, teachers and parents globally for years, and it is clear a new systemic design is needed. With our founding families, we are building a world in which every child has access to quality education, educators’ skills are valued and continuously developed, and parents don’t need to choose between their work and family life.”
He says it also grants pupils company shares (RSUs) as they grow with the school. Currently available to English-speaking students in the CET time zone, the bina School is planning a SaaS product for governments, NGOs and school systems.
“We right now compete against companies like Outschool, Pearson’s online Academy, Primer and Prisma,” he told me over a call. “So these are the big names of the last year for the first phase. But the strategy is that we’re building it in two phases. The first phase is actually building a school that we operate as a ‘lab’ school. And the second phase is what we call ‘bina as a service’. So it’s a SaaS ‘school as a service’. The idea is that we offer collaboration with NGOs and governments, doing accreditation and training and licencing of the product. So for that second part we’re actually competing against the big accreditation system.”
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White-label SaaS shipping startup Outvio closes $3M round led by Change Ventures
Outvio, an Estonian startup that provides a white-label SaaS fulfillment solution for medium-sized and large online retailers in Spain and Estonia, has closed a $3 million early-stage financing round led by Change Ventures.
Also participating were TMT Investments (London), Fresco Capital (San Francisco) and Lemonade Stand (Tallinn). Several angels also joined the round, including James Berdigans (Printify) and Kristjan Vilosius (Katana MRP). This is the startup’s first institutional round of funding after bootstrapping since 2018.
Online retailers usually have to use a number of different tools or hire expensive developers to create in-house shipping solutions. Outvio offers online stores of any size a post-purchase shipping setup, which seeks to replicate an Amazon-style experience where customers can also return packages. Among others, it competes with ShippyPro, which runs out of Italy and has raised $5 million to date.
“We can give any online store all the tools needed to offer a superior post-sale customer experience,” Juan Borras, co-founder and CEO of Outvio, said. “We can integrate at different points in their fulfillment process, and for large merchants, save them hundreds of thousands in development costs alone.”
“What happens after the purchase is more important than most shops realize,” he added. “More than 88% of consumers say it is very important for them that retailers proactively communicate every fulfillment and delivery stage. Not doing so, especially if there are problems, often results in losing that client. Our mission is to help online stores streamline everything that happens after the sale, fueling repeat business and brand-loyal customers with the help of a fantastic post-purchase experience.”
“While online retailing has a long way to go, the expectations of consumers are increasing when it comes to delivery time and standards,” Rait Ojasaar, investment partner at lead investor Change Ventures, said. “The same can be said about the online shop operators who increasingly look for more advanced solutions with consumer-like user experience. The Outvio team has understood exactly what the gap in the market is and has done a tremendous job of finding product-market fit with their modern fulfillment SaaS platform.”
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