Evolve Bits, Inc which operates software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup Zenskar, has raised $3.5 million (Rs 28 crore) in a seed funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Shine Capital, Basecamp Fund and Converge.
The New York and Bengaluru-based startup will use the funds to invest in engineering talent, accelerate product development and advance their go-to-market initiatives.
Founded by Apurv Bansal and Saurabh Agrawal, Zenskar offers a flexible billing platform that enables SaaS companies to handle complexities in pricing that include usage-based pricing, subscriptions, nuanced discounts, credits, custom currencies, prepaid, postpaid, and ramp deals.
Bansal and Agrawal sold their previous startups to Snapdeal and Gaana respectively. Bansal formerly managed data products at Google, while Agrawal has experience building financial-related products.
The company said that with an increase in SaaS spending, pricing is evolving from vanilla subscriptions to granular and consumption-based. Often, product launches and pricing changes get delayed because of limitations in billing tools. SaaS companies have to devote significant engineering resources to automate their billing processes. Zenskar aims to overcome these billing-related limitations, but also further automate accounting, streamline receivables management workflows and provide robust analytics. Zenskar integrates with the entire stack of a company. Onboarding can be done by non-technical users.
“When we met co-founders Apurv and Saurabh and heard their vision of a no-code, fully customizable billing platform, we knew they were solving a common pain point for SaaS companies. Zenskar provides a multi-variable and customizable consumption-based contracting, pricing, and billing engine. The product integrates into a company’s product, allowing unlimited flexibility on pricing with multiple vectors of customizations. Companies can use a combination of usage and subscription billing, tailor the variables for each customer, modify the billing logic with scale and size, and create real-time invoices with reconciliation. While consumption-based billing is an initial wedge, the vision is to build an end-to-end quote-to-cash engine,” Bessemer said in a separate blog post.