Startup Zenskar which is focused on facilitating automated billing workflows for SaaS companies has secured $3.5 million in seed funding.
This current seed funding round was spearheaded by Bessemer Ventures Partners. Other backers who supported the round include Shine Capital, Basecamp Fund and Converge.
Operating out of Bengaluru and New York, the company is designing a platform to help SaaS companies produce automated billing to cater to their complex pricing plans. These pricing plans include subscription pricing, usage based pricing, prepaid or ramp deals, credit custom currencies and nuanced discounts.
According to Zenskar’s co-founder Apurv Bansal the current trend for most SaaS companies reflects a shift to a consumption based pricing model on customers demand which is predicted on macro tailwinds like automation, product-led growth and AI. Bansal predicted that in the next decade basic subscriptions will account for around 30% of the market while the remaining 70% will run on consumption based billing and complex subscriptions.
Zenskar deviates from the SaaS billing platforms that saturate the market currently in that its platform permits an ease of operation without a dependency on engineers. Through Zenskar’s platform, companies will be able to run no code and low code manner solutions.
Bansal expresses the visualized aspirations of Zenskar in his projections:
“We fundamentally believe that going forward, engineering bandwidth in companies will continue to decline, and software solutions that need to be adopted will need to be adopted by non-technical users”.
Zenskar was cofounded by Saurabh Agrawal and Apurv Bansal who both sold their previous startups to Gaana and Snapdeal respectively. The duo had previously garnerd impressive work experience from such companies as Google, Elevation Capital, Basepair, Harvard Business School, IIT Delhi and IIT Bombay.
Zenskar was born out of concrete research and interaction with over 120 customers. Reiterating this Agrawal explains; we try to make the best tool from scratch after talking to so many people”.
Zenskar’s major target market is the U S. Currently, the company’s two engineers work remotely from India although there is plan underway to set up a Bengaluru physical office. According to Bansal, the company already has a client live on its proof of concept and around 12 other customers are currently on its waitlist.
Reflecting on the funding round, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners Anant Vidur Puri related his company’s excitement to support Zenskar’s effort to break off the prevailing quote to cash tooling for SaaS platforms. According to Puri’s statement, what impressed Bessemer Venture Partners the most was Zenskar’s “deep understanding of customer pain points, and their DNA of first principles innovation to provide a radically unique and flexible billing software”.
Zenskar’s plans to delve further beyond SaaS billing. The secured funds will be used by the company to bolster its engineering department. More efforts will also be channelled to innovative solutions especially on automated accounting, ease of payments and the provision of analytics to companies in transport, telecommunications, Media, IoT and other such sectors in the ecosystem.
As originally reported in (https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/03/saas-billing-platform-zenskar-funding-bessemer-ventures-partners/)
