by Zenskar , a startup that aims to help SaaS companies automate billing workflows, has raised $3.5 million in a seed funding round.
Headquartered in New York and Bangalore, Zenskar builds a platform for SaaS companies to create accounts for their complex pricing plans — whether based on usage pricing, subscriptions, tiered discounts, credits, custom currencies, prepaid or ramped offers .
Apurv Bansal, co-founder of Zenskar, said in an interview that 10% to 15% of SaaS companies today have moved to a consumption-based pricing model according to customer demand due to macroeconomic tailwinds such as growth based products, automation and artificial intelligence. . Simple subscriptions will only be about 30% of the market, while complex subscription and consumption-based billing will make up the rest over the next decade, he predicted.
The market is flooded with similar SaaS billing platforms, but Bansal said Zenskar allows companies to to configure their solution in a no-code, low-code way, without requiring them to rely on engineers.
“We fundamentally believe that going forward, engineering bandwidth in companies will continue to shrink, and the software solutions that need to be adopted will need to be adopted by non-technical users,” said Bansal, who previously worked as a product manager at Google and Indian e-commerce company Snapdeal.
Bansal co-founded Zenskar with Saurabh Agrawal in March — after surveying more than 120 customers to understand their billing challenges. “In general, tools are built in a linear fashion,” Agrawal said. “We thought of Zenskar like building – try to build the best tool from the ground up after talking to so many people.”
Bansal and Agrawal are second-time entrepreneurs having sold their previous startups Snapdeal and music streaming app Gaana, respectively.
Zenskar’s proof of concept is already live with one customer and about 12 customers are on its waiting list, Bansal said. The startup targets the US as its market, though its small two-person engineering team works remotely from India. Bansal said they are planning to open a physical office in Bengaluru.
The seed funding round was led by Bessemer Ventures Partners and included Shine Capital, Basecamp Fund and Converge.
“We are excited to partner with Zenskar on their journey to fundamentally disrupt cash offering tools for SaaS companies. We were impressed by their deep understanding of customer pain points and first-principles innovation DNA to deliver a radically unique and flexible billing software,” said Anant Vidur Puri, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, in a prepared statement.
Zenskar plans to use its funding to expand its engineering team. It also aims to go beyond SaaS billing and offer solutions to automate accounting, facilitate payments and provide analytics to companies in sectors such as telecommunications, transport, IoT and media.
