When Sagetap founders Sahil Khanna and Kevin Hughes began working at early-stage enterprise software startups, they were surprised to find that the companies they worked at were trying to sell their innovative technology through the through old-fashioned methods such as cold, repeated emails. calls.
Khanna, a former product marketer, and Hughes, a former sales manager, knew these methods weren’t effective for selling software or helping buyers get the solution they needed. They decided to try to build a better solution.
“Company executives are frustrated, their emails are being destroyed,” Sagetap CEO Khanna told TechCrunch. “In their own words, there are far too many suppliers to keep track of. They don’t know who is credible. For context, there are nearly 400 enterprise tech unicorns alone and countless other small business startups, according to CB Insights.
Khanna and Hughes launched Sagetap to try to solve these problems. Sagetap spent the first year of its life as a platform designed to give buyers a place to research and explore options. The company reached $1 million in ARR with this strategy, Khanna said, but decided Sagetap should be more than just a place for buyers to gather information.
Sagetap therefore built an AI-powered market based on research. Today, potential customers can browse Sagetap’s database of software companies, both of which are selected to be featured on the platform, and pay a subscription fee to remain listed. For each supplier, buyers can access information including publicly available information, purchase prices, and anonymized feedback and insights that Sagetap’s AI derives from sales calls made through the platform. The marketplace uses AI to rank its suppliers and recommend options to its users by matching them with businesses that match their criteria.
“This industry is huge, it’s a trillion-dollar business,” Khanna said. “It’s broken. Buyers and sellers, there’s a lot of friction. We looked at what’s happening with Uber and Airbnb, which brought incredible efficiency (through) a marketplace and thought that would happen to sales of businesses (industry).
The San Francisco-based company says it is profitable, making money from vendor subscriptions and meetings booked on the platform, and this month announced a $6.8 million funding round led by NFX with participation from venture capital firms including Uncorrated Ventures and Emergent Ventures. The round also included 15 of their clients, such as Oracle, Dell, SecureFrame and Descope, who were behind the round.
“Initially, we weren’t looking for funding,” Khanna said. “This was initiated by our own customers. A number of technology executives asked us to invest and we decided to open it.
Enterprise software encompasses a number of different categories and Khanna said Sagetap started with the areas buyers are most interested in currently, including cybersecurity, AI infrastructure and developer operations.
Although Sagetap is not the leading enterprise software marketplace and large organizations like AWS host theirs, Sagetap believes it stands out for the way it uses AI to analyze its sales calls and recommendations.
Since the AI renaissance really began to gain momentum in 2022, many companies have sought to improve the enterprise software sales process with AI. But many of them have focused on the seller and aren’t offering a new model, but simply automating an aspect of the existing model, whether that’s using generative AI to create email messages. sales pitch or use technology to better find prospects. . What Sagetap is doing actually looks significantly different.
Khanna said they’re getting a lot of pitches from venture capital firms looking to make it easier for people to find their portfolio companies. This suggests that the platform could be useful in allowing enterprise software startups to market to large buyers who would otherwise overlook them. While good for visibility, this strategy is in many ways similar to pay-to-play. Sagetap guarantees that they only allow vendors on the platform that they have vetted for things like customer engagement, financing, and market traction, but 73% of vendors that contacted are allowed to register.
But buyers seem satisfied. Sagetap now has 5,000 buyers over the past five years, with revenue increasing 2.7 times year over year.
“The engine is working,” Khanna said. “We are seeing very strong growth. Next year is really going to be about growing the community of tech experts, increasing our visibility in the market and really doubling down.
techcrunch
