SaaS startup Rocketlane, which serves skilled services teams in countries including the U.S., India and Europe with its automation platform, has raised $24 million in a fresh investment. It plans to deploy AI to assist enterprises higher understand customer feedback.
Skilled services teams at an enterprise are tasked with delivering projects to clients on time and inside budget. Nevertheless, for such a critical task, these teams don’t get unified solutions and sometimes juggle amongst multiple tools to get their work done. This delays project deliveries and makes clients anxious. Recently, a category called skilled services automation (PSA) emerged to serve service teams. Nonetheless, some known PSA solutions still depend on traditional software, leading to inaccuracy in project health reports and subpar delivery experiences.
Enter Rocketlane. The startup, headquartered in Utah and Chennai, replaces several tools that skilled services teams use for client projects, including time tracking, resource management, project accounting and management, document collaboration and communication, with what it calls its all-in-one modern PSA platform.
Founded in April 2020 by second-time entrepreneurs Srikrishnan Ganesan, Vignesh Girishankar and Deepak Bala, Rocketlane initially aimed to support customer onboarding. Nevertheless, it has broadened its scope and doubled down on addressing the needs of skilled services teams.
The concept of Rocketlane got here from the issues the co-founders faced while onboarding their customers of their previously built in-app messaging startup FreshChat, which Freshworks acquired in 2015.
“We felt the projects that skilled services teams were running were causing a whole lot of anxiety internally and externally … And the pattern we could see is it is a moment in time when the client experiences a partnership with the seller. And so if it goes well, if it’s a blissful partnership, then the client doubles down on that partnership,” Ganesan told TechCrunch.
Rocketlane targets mid-market and lower enterprise clients with skilled services teams of 150 to 2,000 members. Its customer base includes SalesLoft, OpenGov, LivePerson, Fivetran, Personio and Icertis. The startup competes against core PSA platforms comparable to Kantata and project management tools like Asana and Monday.com by combining each.
The all-equity Series B funding, co-led by 8VC, Matrix Partners India and Nexus Enterprise Partners, will enable Rocketlane to reinforce its PSA platform.
Ganesan said that the startup plans to introduce conversational AI to assist skilled services teams get signals from client meetings on whether customers wish to proceed to pay for his or her projects or could take a backseat. Rocketlane can also be introducing AI templates for emails and documents that the services teams use. Moreover, the startup is upgrading the client portal it offers to enterprises for his or her clients with a web site builder-like experience to make it consistent with their brand.
Rocketlane currently has 500 paying customers globally, with 60% of its total revenue coming from the U.S. It plans expansion within the U.S. by hiring more leadership and sales positions. Further, it looks to expand into Europe by hosting a one-day event in September.
The startup has a headcount of 120 people: 15 within the U.S. and the remaining in India.
To this point, Rocketlane raised $45 million, with its Series A round of $18 million coming in January 2022. Ganesan said the startup’s valuation grew around 2x the last round, without sharing any specifics. He also mentioned that the startup saw over 3.1x growth in revenues in 2023.
