- Kluster enables companies to beat their revenue targets with its revenue strategy AI platform.
- The round was led by Foresight, with participation from SuperSeed and strategic angels, including Cognism CEO James Isilay.
- In 2022, venture capital investment dropped by 35 per cent1. Close to 300,000 tech employees have been laid off2 since then, and over 70 per cent of companies have missed their revenue quota.3 Profitability has become a crucial factor for investors.
- Harnessing the most advanced sales forecasting AI, Kluster gives revenue leaders the playbook to plan, engineer, and execute their revenue strategy, at a time when the market desperately needs it.
- Kluster is relied upon by growing companies like CurrencyCloud, ExtraHop, OysterHR, SEON, TrueLayer and TigerConnect.
Kluster, the platform for planning and executing revenue strategy, has raised a $5 Million Series A round. The investment was led by Foresight Group, with participation from SuperSeed and strategic angels, including Cognism CEO James Isilay, and will be used to accelerate product development and revenue expansion.
Kluster’s platform enables sales leaders of fast-growing businesses to consistently beat their targets. It uses AI to analyse data and trends, providing a leading indicator for sales performance. And crucially, it helps sales reps, managers, and the C-Suite know what they need to do to hit the quarterly sales target.
It helps sales leaders in two ways. Firstly through crafting the sales plan. This is adetailed map of everything that needs to happen during the quarter and the year: how many salespeople to hire, sales calls to make, prospects to contact, opportunities to create, etc. By breaking everything down into KPIs, everyone knows exactly what needs to happen. Secondly Kluster monitors performance, revises the forecast and course-corrects the plan. Based on activity across the sales team, Kluster’s platform provides a real-time forecast of business performance. This helps sales leaders understand where there might be shortfalls and what levers they should pull to improve performance. With Kluster, everyone from the junior sales reps up to the board level has a unified view of the performance and status of the business. This enables leadership to course correct as early as possible, always calling the right shots sooner.
Kluster came about due to the shared professional challenges of the founders, university friends Dan Thompson and Rory Brown. Rory was running a large team of salespeople in the City of London, where he lacked a reliable way to get accurate forecasts.
He turned to Dan, a Theoretical Physics graduate with expertise in building forecasting models for catastrophic events, such as hurricanes and terror attacks, across the Lloyd’s of London market. Dan had previously been an early employee at London fintech Acturis.
AiThority: The Use of AI in Hollywood
They joined forces to launch Kluster and have since grown to a team of 30 supporting growing companies across North America and Europe, including CurrencyCloud, ExtraHop, OysterHR, SEON, TrueLayer and TigerConnect.
Dan Thompson, Chief Executive Officer, said, “It has never been more important to plan and execute revenue strategy than it is today. With the recent VC bubble, the metrics that mattered went from growth, burn and margins to growth, growth and growth.”
Dan continued, “The bubble burst, and companies have now rediscovered the importance of rigorous planning, robust strategy and comprehensive revenue reporting. Which is why I am delighted to partner with Foresight and deepen our relationship with SuperSeed, to bring our solution to this problem to the global market.”
The Series A follows an earlier investment of $1M in April 2020 led by SuperSeed and Newable Ventures. The latest funding will be used to fund product development and expand the go-to-market team. The company aims to move deeper into the American market and secure executive hires across 2023 and 2024, which will be accelerated by this funding.
Jack Eadie, Managing Director at Foresight, said, “We are excited to join the exceptional Kluster team in the next part of their journey. They have a strong product-market fit, and I’m relieved to see a platform that enables companies to forecast revenue more accurately. Kluster’s team is shaping the future of sales, and I am eager to see what they develop next.”
Mads Jensen, Managing Partner at SuperSeed, said, “We often say that “sales solve all problems”, and it has never been truer than in this climate. Companies need to deliver more with less, and having a world-class sales function is essential to that. We are excited to expand our partnership with Kluster and support Rory and Dan in building a great SaaS company”.
‘With Kluster, we can actually spend time growing sales and improving performance instead of continuously working to put the numbers together’ – Extrahop
“We run our business on Kluster. It powers our board meetings and forecast calls and was pivotal in being prepared for our $94M Series B last year.” – SEON
Read More: ChatGPT Won’t Replace Your Marketing Job, But it’s Critical to Leverage for Success
Kluster is the leading revenue analytics and forecasting platform for scaling technology businesses. Harnessing the most advanced modelling technology available, we help revenue leaders hit targets every quarter by providing them with the playbook to plan, engineer, and execute their revenue strategy like the best technology businesses in the world.
Hundreds of revenue teams use Kluster to deliver powerful forecasts, close their sales teams’ productivity gap, and inform a stronger go-to-market strategy. Kluster Intelligence Platform turns sales data into actionable insights specifically geared towards commercial gain.
Foresight Group was founded in 1984 and is a leading listed infrastructure and private equity investment manager. With a long-established focus on ESG and sustainability-led strategies, it aims to provide attractive returns to its institutional and private investors from hard-to-access private markets. Foresight manages over 350 infrastructure assets with a focus on solar and onshore wind assets, bioenergy and waste, as well as renewable energy enabling projects, energy efficiency management solutions, social and core infrastructure projects and sustainable forestry assets. Its private equity team manages eleven regionally focused investment funds across the UK and an SME impact fund supporting Irish SMEs. This team reviews over 2,500 business plans each year and currently supports more than 250 investments in SMEs. Foresight Capital Management manages four strategies across seven investment vehicles with an AUM of £1.3 billion.
Foresight operates in eight countries across Europe, Australia and United States with AUM of £12.2 billion*. Foresight Group Holdings Limited listed on the Main Market of the London Stock Exchange in February 2021.
SuperSeed is a London-based venture capital firm built by founders for founders. The firm invests in technical teams building business and industrial automation startups at the seed stage and then actively supports them to reach their first £million in sales.
Latest Insights: Is Customer Experience Strategy Making or Breaking Your ‘Shopping Festival’ Sales?
[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]
Comments are closed.