Calixa, the product-led growth GTM platform, announced that it has raised $12 million in Series A funding led by Kleiner Perkins with new investors Salesforce Ventures and Twilio. Calixa will use the funds to aggressively hire across all functions.
“Today’s fastest growing software companies – Twilio, Slack, Calendly, Netlify – leverage a product-led GTM. They let users try products right away and put them in control of their buying journey,” said Thomas Schiavone, co-founder and CEO. “However, existing GTM tooling was built for a top-down sales motion and product-led companies are struggling to use these outdated tools. Calixa was built from the ground up for a sales-assisted product-led motion. It keeps GTM teams on the same page by providing a data-rich customer view and a workflow optimized for high velocity sales.”
“As one of Twilio’s first product managers, it’s in Thomas’ DNA to put customers first,” said Jeff Lawson, CEO and co-founder of Twilio. “I’m confident in Thomas’ leadership and am proud to see him building a platform that enables companies to have a fundamentally better relationship with their customers. I’m excited to see what Thomas and the Calixa team build for product-led growth companies!”
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Product-Led Growth Platform for Sales
Product-Led Growth is redefining how companies work with customers. The customer journey begins with a free signup and the account grows as the user and their teammates find value with the product. Companies struggle to stay on top of thousands of sign-ups that are all at different stages of their journey. To be successful, sales teams need to easily prioritize who to talk to, quickly get context on them, and effortlessly engage.
With the public launch of Calixa earlier this year, companies finally have a GTM tool purpose-built for Product-Led Growth. Software companies like Netlify, Voiceflow and Courier are relying on Calixa to power their product-led sales motion. Netlify’s Director of Sales Development, Devin Oliver, said that, “Calixa cuts down our time from insight to action. There is a huge efficiency and conversion gain with product qualified leads that Calixa identifies.”
Calixa is spearheading a new-approach for GTM teams to manage and measure their funnel of product-qualified leads(PQLs). Companies are finding that PQLs convert at a rate of 5X their MQLs.
“Best-in-class SaaS companies are increasingly adopting product-led growth as a strategy to scale and sustain their business,” said Robert Keith, Managing Director, Salesforce Ventures. “We’re excited to invest in and partner with Calixa as they empower customers to marry top down and bottoms up sales motions to deliver customer success.”
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Leveraging the Modern Data Stack
Today, Calixa is also announcing the beta of direct support for the Modern Data Stack. Companies can now connect their data warehouse Snowflake or BigQuery warehouse to Calixa giving customer-facing teams self-serve reporting, dashboards, and automation. Data teams now can easily empower their GTM counterparts with little to no engineering effort.
Bucky Moore, Partner at Kleiner Perkins said, “The next chapter of the modern data stack will be about re-architecting core business apps around the cloud data warehouse. Calixa offers a glimpse into this future by enabling GTM teams to operate on the warehouse as a source-of-truth for their workflows. Thomas and Fred have experienced the pain of scaling the product-led GTM first-hand, and are moving quickly toward their long-term vision of re-thinking the GTM platform for this growing population of companies. We are excited to be doubling down on our partnership by leading their Series A.”
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