Early-stage fund pi Ventures leads $1-mn funding round in SaaS start-up CSB

Start-up accelerator Axilor Ventures also participates in round, funding will be used to drive growth, product innovation

Early stage venture fund pi Ventures has led an investment of $1 million in CustomerSuccessBox (CSB), a customer success platform for B2B SaaS (software as-a-service) companies. This is the fifth investment by the venture fund so far.

Start-up accelerator and early stage seed fund Axilor Ventures also participated in the round.

The funding will be used to drive growth and product innovation.

“pi's focus is to invest in start-ups that leverage dark data to solve a large-scale problem and CSB’s solution fit well. In a large SaaS company, it is the job of the Customer Success Managers (CSM) to drive retention. However, if a SaaS company has several customers, it is difficult to keep track of customer usage patterns and predict churn,” Abishek Surendran, partner, pi Ventures, told Business Standard. “Also, CSMs need to be involved in the lifecycle of a customer to improve retention. Hence, the requirement of a sophisticated tool like CSB that leverages AI to improve the productivity of CSMs.”

The Bengaluru-based VC firm had closed $25 million in funding, its second, in January this year. Its first close was announced in March 2017 at $13 million, with backing from former Infosys director T V Mohandas Pai, Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal, MakeMyTrip founder Deep Kalra and Info Edge’s Sanjeev Bikchandani.

The firm focuses on financing artificial intelligence-backed businesses, including those in the health care, logistics, retail, fintech and enterprise sectors. It follows the model of investing Rs 30 million to Rs 60 million per start-up.

It had earlier invested in energy data analytics company Zenatix, health care AI start-up SigTuple, NIRAMAI, which is developing a novel software to detect breast cancer and medical grade wearable device ten3T.