Rocketlane Corp., maker of a software-as-a-service platform purpose-built for onboarding new customers, today announced that it has closed an $18 million Series A funding round, bringing its total funding to $21 million.

The company, which has headquarters in both India and San Mateo, California, is targeting a niche that is a problem area for software and services companies in particular: “the chaos and stress of onboarding large customers,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Srikrishnan Ganesan. It’s a process that has multiple moving parts, many potential points of failure and often haphazard communication between constituents in sales, training, finance and product groups.

Ganesan defined onboarding as “all the activities that happen between when you sign a contract to making the customer successful,” including configuration, implementation, customer workshops and support.

“Implementation has become a differentiator for companies,” he said. “Customers are so scarred by bad implementations that they don’t want to look at new software anymore. This is a way to say not just that we have a great product but we’re going to get you productive quickly.”

Feedback loop

Rocketlane provides project management and collaboration features along with a constant customer feedback loop via star ratings and comments as well as the ability to give customers selective visibility into the status of the project.

The onboarding market is still relatively small, with MarketsandMarkets Research Private Ltd. estimating total revenues at about $1 billion in 2020. However, it forecasts better than 20% annual growth through 2025.

Rocketlane was recently ranked as a leader in its category by G2 Inc. Ganesan said the company takes a data-focused approach that enables customers to “measure their onboarding and implementation teams,” he said. “We’re not just giving them the product to use however they want. We want to help all these teams level up in how they engage with their customers.”

The firm provides a set of templates that cover the most common types of customer engagements and that can be customized to specific projects. The software also integrates with Salesforce.com Inc.’s customer relationship management system “to bring contextual fields in and tie them to delivery information,” Ganesan said.

Rocketlane launched an onboarding community called Preflight before developing its product and has tapped into its more than 1,200 members for guidance along the way, the CEO said. Launched last June, the product has already signed up nearly 100 paying customers, some of which have 300 people in their professional services organizations using the product.

He dismissed a question about whether the company’s potential user base inside customer businesses is too small, saying sales, customer success and financial professionals are all interested in the onboarding process. “In small companies, we often see that the whole company wants to know what’s happening,” he said.

The round was led by 8VC, a subsidiary of Eight Partners Vc LLC and a previous investor in Asana Inc. Additional funding was provided by Nexus Venture Partners, Matrix Partners Management Services LP and angel investor Gokul Rajaram.

Image: Rocketlane