BuyerAssist.io Raises $2 Mn Seed Funding Led By Stellaris Venture Partners And Emergent Ventures The funding will be used to hire a strong foundational team across India and the US, and fuel the next set of innovations in the product
By Prabhjeet Bhatla •
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San Francisco-headquartered B2B buyer engagement platform BuyerAssist.io on Wednesday announced to have raised $2 million in Seed financing led by Stellaris Venture Partners and Emergent Ventures. This is the company's first round of venture funding and with this announcement, BuyerAssist.io is also publicly launching its beta product and coming out of stealth mode.
BuyerAssist.io was founded by Amit Dugar, Shankar Ganapathy, and Shyam H.N. with a mission to minimize the friction in B2B vendor-buyer relationships, especially for enterprise SaaS businesses.
"B2B buying is undergoing a major transformation. New people are in driver seats and they bring a new set of expectations, especially now with the pandemic and remote working. companies that sell to them must be extremely nimble and adaptive to these changing buyer preferences. The first step in that direction is to drive transparency with a shared system of truth with their buyers, and we help our customers accomplish that," said Shyam HN, co-founder, and chief executive officer, BuyerAssist.io.
The BuyerAssist.io platform acts as the operating system for B2B companies to deliver the most effective buyer experience and enables sales teams to provide their buyers a single, integrated, collaborative engagement interface throughout their journey together. It transforms sales discovery into a collaborative exercise for sellers and buyers to systematically co-develop a shared understanding of the buying team's priorities, desired outcomes, and milestones, and jointly create a Mutual Success Plan that serves as the North Star for their relationship.
The founders of BuyerAssist.io were early employees at sales enablement leader MindTickle and have been in strategic roles during the company's early phase of growth. "As a Venture Capitalist focusing on SaaS space, we get to see hundreds of teams. But it is very rare to find teams that create a perfect storm of domain expertise, functional expertise in different areas of building SaaS companies and at the same time bringing the perfect complementarily between the founders," shared Alok Goyal, partner, Stellaris Venture Partners.
The company said that the funding will be used to hire a strong foundational team across India and the US and fuel the next set of innovations in the product. They have been working with a closed set of design partners for the last nine months and are looking to now scale their beta program further. The platform is expected to come out of the beta program and be made generally available later this year.
"What excites me about BuyerAssist is that it focuses on reducing friction between buyers and sellers. Buyers want more flexibility and less noise. Sellers want to run a more consistent sales process. BuyerAssist facilitates this and enables both to build a long-term partnership. This is where we see the industry heading in the years and decades to come," added Anupam Rastogi, partner, Emergent Ventures.
As per Challenger Inc's research, four out of ten B2B purchase attempts end in no decisions. Research by Gartner highlights that 77 per cent of B2B buyers state their latest purchase to be very complex or difficult and in the same research, it was found that the amount of time spent by a B2B buyer with anyone sales rep maybe only 5-6 per cent of their buying journey. Lack of time with buyers coupled with rapidly shifting buying dynamics is fueling the need for B2B vendors to deliver a buying experience that is unique to the customer's buying priorities, personalized to the various buyer stakeholders, and delivered in the flow of the buying process.
