UPDATED 09:00 EDT / DECEMBER 19 2023

APPS

Ignition raises $8M to enhance collaboration between product and go-to-market teams

Artificial intelligence-powered go-to-market operations startup Ignition GTM Inc. announced today that it’s ready for prime time after raising $8 million in funding.

The investment came via two rounds – seed and pre-seed – and was led by Audacious Ventures and Altman Capital. A number of angel investors also participated in the round, including several unnamed c-suite executives from companies including Airbnb Inc., Opendoor Inc., Uber Technologies Inc. and Instacart Inc.

Ignition is the creator of a go-to-market operations platform that relies on AI to align product, marketing and sales teams to power more successful launches of new products and services. It’s intended to unify the entire launch lifecycle of new offerings in a single hub, encompassing pre-launch research, roadmapping, GTM planning, internal orchestration and post-launch management.

By switching to a single source of truth, companies can reduce tool fragmentation and the associated costs of that, while enabling greater collaboration across teams. For instance, its platform provides critical context to sales, success and other teams, directly into their everyday tools.

The startup says that by marrying AI with workflow technologies, it can automate every step of GTM operations with repeatable, insight-driven processes. It provides features to help track competitive intelligence, AI tools to help identify product opportunities from sales data, tools for creating launch plans and more.

Ignition claims that its platform is desperately needed, since it believes the go-to-market process is broken at most companies. The issue is that product, sales and marketing teams operate in silos, using different tools that leave them without context or visibility into what their colleagues are doing. As a result, many new product and services launches are a dismal failure, it says, resulting in billions of dollars of missed upsell and cross-sell opportunities, wasted development costs and a struggle to retain customers.

What’s interesting is that many organizations are beginning to realize this. In a blog post announcing the funding, Ignition Chief Executive Derek Osgood said that the disconnection between product management and product marketing teams is damaging businesses, resulting in extreme organizational changes as they try to resolve the problem.

Osgood cites the case of Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, who recently eliminated the product manager function, combining their role with product marketing to connect the company’s go-to-market efforts better. “Organizational changes are one way that leaders are aiming to address the issue, but we believe that the right technology can provide a scalable, long-term solution,” Osgood said.

Ignition claims evidence of that in the impressive traction it has generated thus far, growing its client base to more than 2,500 active users at companies that include Square Financial Services Inc., Flyp Technologies Inc. and MRI Software LLC.

Nakul Mandan of Audacious Ventures said product and marketing teams are increasingly being held accountable for their employers’ financial results, and believes this means they need to be fully aligned on every new initiative. “Ignition is the first company tackling this change from a technological standpoint, by leveraging a smart combination of AI and workflow technology to unify the process end-to-end,” he said. “We believe the team at Ignition is uniquely positioned to build something that will quickly become ubiquitous at companies everywhere.“

Ignition has big plans going forward and will look to build its business team and hire in various go-to-market roles. “We’re also investing in continuing to advance our AI, so we can provide customers with fully intelligent launch planning recommendations and content generation based on their past launch data and best practices, as well as their own brand guidelines and objectives,” Osgood said.

Image: Ignition GTM

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