[Funding alert] Rocketlane raises $3M co-led by Matrix Partners India and Nexus Venture Partners

B2B SaaS startup Rocketlane has raised $3 million in seed funding led by Matrix Partners India and Nexus Venture Partners.

The funding also saw participation from angel investors such as Shreesha Ramdas (CEO, Strikedeck), Jonathan Swanson (Co-founder of Thumbtack), Krish Subramanian and Rajaraman Santhanam (Co-founders of Chargebee), Yamini Bhat (CEO, Vymo), Pradeep Rathinam (CCO of Freshworks), and other leading founders and executives.

The startup said the funds will be used to hire additional talent and continue establishing its leadership in product and mindshare in a new and emerging category. It will also be used for further enhancing its product.

Rocketlane offers a purpose-built unified workspace for collaborating with customers on onboarding projects. It helps businesses shorten their time-to-value, streamline their software implementation journeys, and provide real-time visibility while elevating the customer experience.

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Rocketlane was founded by Srikrishnan Ganesan, Vignesh Girishankar, and Deepak Bala in April 2020. They previously managed Freshchat at Freshworks, after the latter acquired their chat business Konotor (that powered chat in apps like Zomato, Swiggy, and Bigbasket) in 2015.

While growing Freshchat globally and working with larger enterprise customers, they experienced firsthand the difficulties and understood the importance of customer onboarding.

Srikrishnan said, “Conversations with 100+ customer onboarding and implementation leaders highlighted challenges arising from generic project management and collaboration tools. The feedback has helped us shape Rocketlane, set the course for the future, and even start Preflight - a Slack-based community for CS and onboarding professionals. We are now a team of 25 working remotely with a vision to create the gold standard for customer onboarding."

He added, onboarding is becoming the new bottleneck for fast-growing enterprise SaaS ventures, and top VCs are watching the gap, between the Live ARR and Contracted ARR, among their portfolio companies.

Vikram Vaidyanathan, Managing Director, Matrix India, commented,

“Sri, Vignesh, and Deepak are serial SaaS entrepreneurs who’ve worked together for almost a decade, have deep SaaS expertise, and a rich shared history. With Rocketlane, they’re creating the benchmark experience for client on-boarding and building a global brand. We’re excited to back their vision and privileged to partner with them."

The team added that there is a software platform for almost every other stage of the customer journey - sales, customer success, support, etc. But in customer onboarding, most make do with spreadsheets and general-purpose collaboration/project tools and achieve impaired results.

Sameer Brij Verma, Managing Director, Nexus Venture, said, “We are proud to partner with Rocketlane to redefine the customer-onboarding and professional services automation category via our industry-first collaborative purpose-built onboarding platform. Rocketlane's offering allows software and ITES companies to accelerate their time-to-revenue, intelligently manage their client delivery lifecycle with superior internal resource management on a unified workspace, and massively increase customer satisfaction across every client delivery action item.”

The lack of a purpose-built system for onboarding leads to a hit-or-miss execution and a dependence on the heroics of individuals, which in turn leads to delays and botched implementations. Rocketlane aims to fix that”.