Velaris
A platform to support Net Revenue Retention for software firms
Funding stage: Seed
What Velaris does
Velaris is a software platform that supports software companies to improve their ‘Net Revenue Retention’ (NNR), and by upselling to existing clients and identifying churn risks in existing customers. NNR is the percentage of revenue retained from existing customers and is widely used to measure the performance of a SaaS business. It‘s becoming increasingly important in the industry, as a likely recession causes a slowdown across the market in new revenue generation.
The platform is highly adaptable and configurable, providing significantly greater analytical capability compared to its competitors. It allows companies to take a much deeper dive into their client relationships, right down to product-level data.
By doing this, it helps users to identify profitable or at-risk customers and develop workflows and processes to support them – for example, identifying a client that is reducing their usage and building out a strategic plan to get them re-engaged through further education and training.
Why we like it
The market for the product is, quite literally, any company that sells software solutions. This ranges from companies selling contracts to a handful of large customers, to those with thousands of customers.
We view NNR as a growing market and we expect it to follow the trends of the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) market, in which the likes of Salesforce, HubSpot and Pipedrive have grown into high value businesses.
The B2C world regularly uses marketing automation solutions, such as recognising an individual who has not shopped with a brand for the last three months and sending them an incentive to return. Velaris is bringing these types of best-in-class B2C solutions into the B2B world.
What our fund managers say
“The team behind the product is extremely strong. They have built it from scratch in nine months, which is extremely fast. To us, this is really impressive.”
– Simon King – Partner
Who are we backing?
The two founders, Dilanka Kalutota (CEO) and José Fernandez Castano (COO), were both senior members of another business called Mews Systems, an extremely successful European software company that recently raised around £100 million.
They have real experience in running large software companies, understanding the problem from the inside out and managing teams of 50-200 people themselves. This is impressive in itself, but the fact that we were introduced by the CEO of another company in which we have invested was also a huge validation for us.