Toplyne raises $15 million Series A to monetize product-led growth Just five months after its seed round, the company is enabling the likes of Canva, Grafana, Gather.town, and Browserstack to monetize their freemium user base.
San Francisco, California
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May 03, 2022 07:09 AM Pacific Daylight Time
Toplyne, a SaaS platform that lets companies to monetize their product-led growth flywheel, today announced a $15 million Series A funding round led by Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital India, with participation from existing investors Together Fund, Sequoia India’s Surge and angel investors from Canva, Vercel & Zoominfo.
Toplyne lets Growth Teams at product-led SaaS companies monetize their product-led growth by increasing conversions within their freemium user base. The company was founded in June 2021 by Rishen Kapoor and Ruchin Kulkarni who were earlier with Sequoia India and the former VP of Product at Clevertap, Rohit Khanna.
Since the announcement of its $2.5 million seed round in November 2021, the company has on boarded several marquee customers like Canva, Grafana, Gather.Town, and BrowserStack and is all set to launch a self-serve freemium product within the next quarter to onboard a long list of waitlisted customers. The company has more than doubled from 13 to 30 employees across geographies, since the last round of funding.
The genesis of Toplyne happened when the founding team members - former investment analysts at Sequoia India - noticed a fundamental shift in how software was being discovered and bought. Product-led growth (PLG) was at the epicenter of the most successful SaaS companies. User virality, referrals and freemium usage had exploded the top-of-funnel. SaaS companies had more users than ever before. While product-led growth had opened the floodgates at the top of the funnel for successful SaaS companies, the battle had moved from acquisition to conversion.
Most hyper-growth PLG companies have sub 1-2% conversion rates. Monetization is easier said than done. Experimentation, with various permutations of user segments and GTM strategies, is of the essence. The responsibility of this experimental approach lies with “Growth” teams. Growth teams at these companies experiment with various GTM strategies that cost heavily in terms of pooling in time, talent (cross functional teams) and money.
Toplyne lets these teams (their customers) rapidly experiment and deploy various go-to-market (GTM) motions at scale from driving self-serve conversions through in-product nudges (chatbots, paywalls, promos) or sales-assisted conversions through high-velocity inside-sales teams. By assessing complex patterns in large volumes of product-usage data, Toplyne is able to identify users and accounts who have the highest intent to convert to paid subscriptions. Revenue teams using Toplyne are empowered to focus their efforts on users and accounts who show real intent, rather than chasing leads that will never convert.
“Millions of people around the world use Canva to achieve their goals – from high school students to small business owners and the Fortune 500. It’s important that we’re able to identify users where our premium subscriptions are the right fit and can add value to the way they’re using our platform. Toplyne helps us effectively target and scale these efforts at our speed of growth.” - said Toplyne customer David Burson, Head of Product Growth at Canva
Toplyne is committed to becoming a one-stop-shop for PLG businesses to solve their monetization problems. The plug-and-play product seamlessly integrates into existing CRMs (Salesforce. Hubspot), customer engagement platforms (Braze) and product analytics infrastructures (Amplitude, Segment) within minutes.
Ruchin Kulkarni, Co-founder at Toplyne, said, “It's an interesting time to be a monetization software. ARR is back in vogue. PLG SaaS companies need their free users to convert to paid plans. And they need it to happen yesterday. Toplyne fills this gap by enabling businesses to monetize their product-led growth.”
“Whether it’s bubbling up the highest intent users for sales calls, in-product nudges, email campaigns or account expansion, Toplyne’s mission is to transform growth teams from frustrated, hand-tied, prisoners of cross-functional collaboration to agents of change with the power to move metrics at will.” said Rishen Kapoor, Co-founder at Toplyne
The team will use the funding to aggressively deliver on the product roadmap and help PLG companies across the spectrum - from early to late stage, increase their conversion rates. They are hiring in the US across many roles including sales and product marketing. The team is laser-focused on going fully self-serve by the end of the quarter to onboard a growing waitlist of 1000+ companies.
"Monetizing freemium users is an important problem faced by software companies with a PLG motion. We are thrilled to see how the Toplyne team and product has shaped up in the first year of operations. Their unified approach combining in-product nudges and sales assisted conversions is resonating strongly with customers. We believe Toplyne has a shot at being the global leader of this emerging category and the team at Sequoia Capital India is excited to deepen the partnership with them." Ashish Agrawal, MD, Sequoia India
“We are strong believers in building fast. Our product’s first version went live on Day 30 of the company’s existence. We were solely focussed on the outcome of driving up conversion rates for our first customer. Within just a few days of going live, we saw their sales conversion rate double. That’s when we knew we were onto something.” said Rohit Khanna, Co-founder at Toplyne and former VP-Product at CleverTap
About Toplyne
Toplyne is a technology startup that lets growth teams at product-led SaaS companies monetize their product-led growth by increasing conversions within their freemium user base. The company was founded in June 2021 by Rishen Kapoor and Ruchin Kulkarni who were earlier with Sequoia India and the former VP of Product at Clevertap, Rohit Khanna.
For more information, photos and logos please click on the google drive link here. To learn more, visit www.toplyne.io or follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Contact Details
Toplyne
Bilal Mahmood
+44 7714 007257
b.mahmood@stockwoodstrategy.com
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