“There will be a good exit, and we add some new millionaires in Ukraine,” said Vlad Voskresensky, Revenue Grid

On September 2, a Ukrainian company, Revenue Grid (former Invisible.io), announced closing a $20 million Series A round. First and foremost, the company with offices in the US and Kyiv will spend the funds raised on expanding its team. Currently, Revenue Grid employs more than 170 people, and it plans to grow to 250. The main development office and most of the employees are based in Kyiv.

The company has more than 1,200 direct clients, including Hilton, Western Union, Moody’s, Trip Advisor, Red Cross, as well as over 20,000 clients through partnerships with SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, Microsoft, and other CRM vendors.

The co-founder and CEO of Revenue Grid, Vlad Voskresensky, is well known in Ukraine. The editor of AIN.UA has discussed with Vlad the details of that deal. They also spoke about how the company works during the pandemic and its plans for the future.

All photos courtesy of Revenue Grid

Is it the company’s second funding round in its history, or there have been others?

It is really only the second round for the company. The first time we raised $1.5 million in angel investment, half of which was returned when the investor exited. Therefore, the first amount raised resulted in $750,000. Since then, we’ve grown on our own, and the company is now profitable.

Why did you decide to organize this round? Why such an amount? What are the reasons that you increased your personnel by 50% at once?

Today we already have a high-quality and top-selling product in the market. For the next few years, our main goals are to expand our business and increase its recognizability.

We started with a simple idea — to help sales managers to automate all their routines that cost a lot of time with our software that can solve it in a few minutes. Do you remember that our former name was InvisibleCRM? And it fully reflected our value at that moment — to make sales managers not feel that they use a CRM. To automate filling the CRM so that it will remember about itself only and especially for a moment when a sales manager needs to find out something about a client or a potential deal. We wanted to create value not for top managers who decided to integrate the solution but for the sales managers who have to deal with this tool every day and spare their time.

We have significantly improved our sales automation skills and become OEM partners for worldwide CRM vendors like SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, Microsoft, etc. They white labeled our technology. So their clients, by purchasing a CRM from them, also get our product, and we get new users.

By growing, we have evolved and developed our product, adding new features and releasing new technologies. However, we kept our DNA — always to support sales managers and help them be more productive.

Little by little, we transformed ourselves from an “invisible” CRM operational helper into a guided selling platform. It can automatically close a sales manager routine and indicate how and when to close a deal with the best effect or make an optimal decision to increase your total output.

As a demanded product, we are increasingly growing for last three years. One day we realized that continuous bootstrapping only slows down our growth. So we decided to involve new investors to become more famous in the market, grow our sales muscles, and attract new customers.

In 2020, Invisible.io was renamed. Why you did that? And why Revenue Grid? What else is different after your rebranding?

It was our evolution from a back-office “invisible helper,” collecting the data and accurately putting it into the CRM, into a guided selling product that makes all this data work. Some day we understood that we had a unique situation when we obtain precious data in the CRM (usually well structured but never complete) and life data — email, calendar, messengers, phone number (never structured but always complete). InvisibleCRM did only one thing — it connected those two worlds, allowing to transfer and synchronize the data right.

And Revenue Grid made the whole infrastructure much sense. If you analyze this data and closed deals (successful or not) and compare them with current unclosed contracts, you will know that there are so many tasks and steps you need (or do not need) to win and close sales faster.

When our product started to provide sales managers with rapid advice in addition to the data capturing, it was the end of InvisibleCRM and the start of Revenue Grid.

We have kept in the product our expertise: synchronization, integration, and data auto capturing. And added engagement scenario automation — AI-driven interaction with clients when you get notified when it is better to send a follow-up or a reminder or set a call. Moreover, we were the first who implemented revenue signals helping the sales managers make right and in-time decisions about how to react to client behavior.

How much is the Revenue Grid worth today? How is the company’s revenue growing?

We don’t have unicorn status yet, but we are on our way to it 🙂

Over the past two years, we’ve grown in terms of revenue by 120% year over year. Our plan for next year is, as a minimum, to double that figure.

We also have a good churn rate — over 96% of our customers renew their subscriptions, which is very high compared to the industry average. This shows that our users see the value of our products.

How has the pandemic affected the company? Tell us about the impact of the lockdown. How has it affected the company’s revenue and plans?

To be quite frank, at the very beginning of the pandemic, we didn’t know how the business would deal with it — there was a lot of uncertainty. But everything worked out for the best: Revenue Grid became an indispensable platform for sales teams working remotely. Top managers could quickly track all the processes and statuses of transactions in their department, and sales managers could easily synchronize with colleagues and automatically report to their executives.

We got a win-win scenario and increased our user base by 30% during this period.

What is about the clients? How do you attract new customers and keep your old customers active?

As I said, in the last year, our number of users grew by 30%. Our churn rate is also positive — only 4%. Speaking about money, we have a net positive churn. It means that our old clients not only stay with us but also upgrade their subscriptions. Let us assume that we will shut down our entire Sales & Marketing department tomorrow. Even so, we would still grow in revenue with our current clients only.

It may sound overconfident, yes. Because there is so much hard work done by the whole team: starting from a Customer Success specialist who is very accurate to make clients get what they want and expect from the product and ending with the R&D and Product Team that delivers essential quarter updates.

Thanks to our great experience with world giants in the OEM business, we have passed all possible and impossible paths with clients of all sizes, and now our product can share all our experiences with them. That is why we can often resolve a problem like a piece of cake where other vendors give up. If something needs an improvement, our periodical updates allow us to react to such requests quickly. The client always mentions and feels that. As CRM Team Lead of the large-sized legal company Morgan & Morgan, which uses about 7,000 licenses for our product, said, “in the end, it does not matter what product you use — the people behind this product and their ability to react to your requests do matter much more.” And we appreciate it so much.

We perfectly know that until we deliver our clients this value and care of them, we will not have any problems with customer retention.

What is next? When will you do an IPO? 🙂

Next, we will continue to grow and expand our client portfolio as well as integrate new technologies into our platform. The IPO is not our main goal; we think mostly not about the IPO process itself but how to keep our leadership in the worldwide sales automation industry and deliver value to our customers.

We always have had a good reputation in the CRM world. And now we are very proud of Bob Stutz, who joined our board after this round. He is a CRM legend. After Bob desired to join us and said that he “always liked the company and its sales automation innovations,” we felt so inspired. At the same time, we also want to meet his highest expectations. It is our ambition.

We go further knowing that it will be a good exit with dozens of new millionaires in our homeland. Especially because our largest office is in Kyiv, and these guys in Ukraine are magicians.

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