Toplyne, a SaaS platform that enables companies to monetize their product-led growth flywheel, today announced USD15 million in Series A funding 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. The team will use the funding to aggressively deliver on the product roadmap, and scale the data science, engineering, product, and design teams.
Since the announcement of its $2.5 million seed round in November 2021, the company has on- boarded several marquee customers including Canva, Grafana, Gather.Town, InVideo 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.
While Product-led growth (PLG) has opened the floodgates at the top of the funnel for successful SaaS companies, the battle has 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. Toplyne analyzes complex patterns in large volumes of product-usage data to identify users and accounts who have the highest intent to convert to paid subscriptions, and enables growth teams to rapidly experiment with and deploy various go-to-market (GTM) motions at scale – be it driving self-serve conversions through in-product nudges (chatbots, paywalls, promos) or sales-assisted conversions through high-velocity inside-sales teams. Revenue teams are empowered to focus their efforts on users and accounts who show real intent, rather than chasing leads that will never convert.
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), product engagement platforms (Braze) and product analytics infrastructures (Amplitude, Segment) within minutes.
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. Rishen Kapoor and Ruchin Kulkarni come with considerable experience in working with late and early stage startups at Sequoia India, while Rohit Khanna was VP of Product at Clevertap.
Ruchin Kulkarni, Co-founder at Toplyne, said, “It’s an interesting time to be a monetization software. SaaS multiples are at all-time lows. Funding markets are drying up. 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.”
“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
Toplyne is hiring aggressively across data science, engineering, product, and design roles. The team is laser-focused on going fully self-serve by the end of the quarter to onboard a growing waitlist of 1000+ companies.
“No one coherent platform existed for growth teams to rapidly experiment, iterate and scale up growth strategies and GTM motions at scale. We saw this as an opportunity” said Rishen Kapoor, Co-founder and CEO, Toplyne
Customer quotes
“Our growth team uses Toplyne to identify teams most likely to expand in size from our base of millions of active users. When a user is using the product, Canva pings Toplyne’s API to gauge user intent for team creation & expansion. Based on the intent, we trigger an in-product tailored experience to provide value to the users which encourages them towards inviting more users and expanding the team” – said Naman Gupta who is the Product Growth Lead at Canva.
