SaaS firm Toplyne raises $15mn Series A led by Tiger Global, Sequoia

SaaS platform Toplyne announced $15 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.

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. Product-led growth 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.”

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 is committed to becoming a one-stop-shop for PLG businesses to solve their monetization problems, said the company in a release. 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.

"Monetising 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