Software-as-a-service billing startup Subskribe exited stealth mode today, armed with $18.4 million through its initial seed and Series A funding rounds and what it says is the world’s first adaptive quoting and billing platform for modern SaaS companies.

The Series A round was led by 8VC, while Slow Ventures led the seed round. Senior executives from companies that include Asana Inc., Okta Inc. and UIPath Inc. also participated in the rounds.

Subskribe is launching to satisfy the growing demand for what it says is “post-subscription SaaS,” or a more dynamic and flexible way for companies to sell software with deals that can change and evolve based on each customer’s needs.

Software billing used to be a simple thing. Companies simply snapped up a software license for each user or server and then renewed them on an annual basis. Then came SaaS subscriptions, wherein companies basically pay to access software on a per month or per year basis for a specific number of users. But these days, SaaS companies want to offer more flexible terms, with discounts and consumption-based pricing and contracts that expand over time with additional features and seats.

The problem with doing this is that it’s impossible to agree a deal that can’t be quoted or billed. Traditional configure-price-quote and billing solutions are designed for simple invoices with the same deliverables each period. So it becomes nigh on impossible for salespeople to customize deals to meet each client’s needs. If a sales team does go ahead and get creative, it causes massive headaches for finance teams as they struggle to reconcile invoices with the constantly changing terms of an order.

Subskribe, founded by billing and payment veterans from Zuora Inc, Okta, Netflix Inc. and Google LLC, thinks it has the solution. It explains that its adaptive quote-to-revenue system is built around the concept of dynamic orders that evolve over time right down to the individual line item.

So each part of Subskribe’s platform, from quote to billing, refers to the same repository of orders, which serves as a single source of truth. So teams enjoy the same unified experience from proposal to revenue, with no silos and no need for finance departments to puzzle over each bill.

The company says its platform enables flexible, usage-based billing, allowing businesses to design and bill just about any kind of deal they want and have the terms of that deal change over time. That means they can create deals with ramp-up pricing that gradually layer in additional features or users over time. The goal, Subskribe says, is to make SaaS deals as customizable and as flexible as SaaS itself is.

Subskribe Chief Executive Durga Pandey (pictured left, alongside the company’s co-founders) said the quote-to-revenue process is the Achilles Heel of most SaaS firms today.

“It’s hard to set up a complex quote. It’s hard to reconcile quotes and invoices,” Pandey said. “It’s hard to bill subscriptions and one-off services. Subskribe makes all those hard things easy. It enables businesses to design deals that make sense for them, not their software.”

Liz Miller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that systems such as Subskribe are more about putting control in the hands of subscribers, while expanding revenue opportunities for subscription businesses, meaning they’re as much about smart selling as they are about seamless experiences for customers.

“By optimizing offering and pricing it gets the right product for the customer at the right price for both brand and buyer,” Miller explained. “Expect to see a lot more solutions like this as automated smart revenue operations take center stage in growth and experience.”

One early adopter of Subskribe’s product is Gremlin Inc., the creator of an information technology reliability platform, and it said the platform is like a “painkiller for finance and operations teams.”

“My team has had a difficult time gaining consistency between our CRM, our manually generated quotes, and then our invoicing and revenue recognition processes,” said Gremlin Senior Director of Finance Daryl Allen. “Subskribe’s tool not only combines these key functions, it simplifies and enhances the process from start to finish.”

Subskribe isn’t the only startup attempting to revolutionize the SaaS billing industry and make it easier for software firms to offer more flexible pricing to their customers. Last week, London-based m3ter Inc. raised $17.5 million to help companies enable usage-based pricing with their SaaS products.

Image: Subskribe