Toplyne raises $15M to help SaaS companies sell more

California-based Toplyne, a startup that provides a platform to help product-led companies improve their conversion rates, today announced it has raised $15 million in a series A round of funding.

Over the past decade or so, software-as-a-service (SaaS) has evolved into a major market segment, growing from $31 billion in 2015 to $152 billion in 2021. Companies like Zoom continue to be the category leaders but there are many more, lesser-known players that are solving key challenges across areas through software. They are drawing hundreds of thousands of users, raising VC money and scaling their product on a constant basis.

However, even with all the growth, one major problem continues to mar most SaaS enterprises – conversion. The firms can draw users through their freemium offerings, but struggling to convert them into paying or premium customers. In fact, today, most hyper-growth product-led companies are witnessing conversion rates under 1-2%. This is far from optimum and has a major impact on revenue growth.

Toplyne identifies users to target

Founded in 2021, Toplyne solves this challenge by providing a tool that identifies which users are most likely to convert and shares that information directly with sales teams so they could act instantly.

The offering comes as a major upgrade to the current methods of conversion where internal teams make random calls to accounts or try to build their own tooling to identify those with the strongest conversion intent. Both strategies take a lot of time and resources, especially the latter where data engineers and scientists have to come together to extract and transform product usage data, iterate on models and then sync insights from them with CRMs.

“A simple way to visualize Toplyne is that we lie in between your data (product usage, billing, support, etc.) and end applications where work gets done. We have productized and generalized what lies in between the two ends of the stack,” Ruchin Kulkarni, the cofounder of the company, told Venturebeat.

The solution plugs directly into an analytics infrastructure (Snowflake, Amplitude or any other) and analyzes user signals such as product usage and paywall interactions to classify users into three groups – high intent users, low intent users and fence-sitters. Then, the information about these is exported to the sales teams’ CRMs (Salesforce, Outreach etc.), enabling them to convert those leads through the right intervention at the right time. They could use the insights to run rapid GTM experiments, like personalized calls with discounts for fence-sitters, and deploy the strategies that work at scale.

Key customers

While Kulkarni, who was previously with Sequoia India, did not share the exact growth figures, he did note that the company has roped in major SaaS players over the past few months, including Canva, InVideo, Grafana, BrowserStack, GatherTown. 

“Customers like InVideo use Toplyne to sync their hottest leads into their CRM systems, from where the sales team drives conversions. They’ve seen a 1.8 times increase in sales conversion rates since Toplyne went live,” he said. 

The company’s cofounder also emphasized that PLG CRMs that show user journeys through activity graphs (among other things) do not offer insights to this level to help product-driven teams aggressively identify potential customers and sell to them. In fact, the company claims that its intent models can identify 50% or more conversions by limiting the search to just the top 1-2% of the highest intent users.

Plan ahead

With this round of funding, Toplyne will focus on expanding its team and delivering on the product roadmap. This includes launching a fully self-service product within the next 3 months to onboard waitlisted SaaS players and scaling key business functions such as sales, growth, product marketing, and customer success over the next few quarters.

According to Fortune Business Insights, the global SaaS market will surpass $700 billion by 2028. Enterprises can expect to see the development of more tools like this in the coming years.