Nue IO Inc., a startup that helps software-as-a-service providers bill their customers, has raised $20 million in funding to support its growth efforts.

The company detailed in its announcement of the round today that Inovia Capital was the lead investor. Information Venture Partners, Bluefish Capital, NextWorld Capital, NJP Ventures and Operator Stack Fund participated as well. The Series A raise brings Nue’s total outside funding to $40 million.

SaaS providers regularly adjust their pricing in response to business changes. A company that builds an artificial intelligence model into its service may wish to launch a new, more expensive subscription tier to monetize the feature. If the same company later switches to a more hardware-efficient model, it might lower subscription prices to reflect the reduced inference costs. 

Rolling out price changes can involve a significant amount of manual work on the part of a SaaS provider’s finance team. Additionally, it requires the salespeople who sell the provider’s services to adjust their workflows. San Francisco-based Nue offers a revenue management platform that promises to ease the task.

The platform is built on Salesforce Inc.’s popular CRM, or customer relationship management, platform. Nue positions it as an alternative to the cloud giant’s built-in revenue management tool.

Nue allows SaaS providers to create records that specify the price of each offering in their product portfolios. A company could, for example, define three subscription plans and two paid extensions that provide additional features. Its salespeople can then mix and match those offerings to create product bundles for customers.

Besides subscriptions, Nue also makes it possible to implement usage-based pricing of the kind used by public cloud providers and discounts. The platform likewise lends itself to billing customers for physical goods. An A/B tool allows companies to test multiple pricing options side-by-side and identify which one drives the most sales. 

Nue also promises to ease some of the back-office financial tasks involved in SaaS billing. When salespeople apply a discount to a customer’s purchase, the platform automatically calculates the new price. It also streamlines the task of requesting approvals for price cuts and other deal term changes.

When a customer buys multiple subscriptions, SaaS providers often perform co-terming. This is the process of setting the subscriptions to expire on the same day so they can be renewed at once by the user. Nue says its platform automates the manual work historically involved in the task.

The company claims to have tripled its revenue over the past year thanks to strong demand. It counts AI startup Glean Technologies Inc. and data management provider Instabase Inc. among its customers. To keep up the momentum, Nue will use its new funding round to grow its international presence and roll out more features.

Image: Nue