Announcing Subskribe Series A

Over the past few years, we’ve watched as subscriptions have become both an increasingly prevalent business model for leading software businesses, as well as a modernizing force for legacy companies. The reason is simple: subscriptions represent a higher-quality revenue stream — one that is more predictable and accessible to customers than high one-time costs. However, implementing subscription billing remains painful for many companies, and requires maintenance of multiple siloed systems.

While a subscription model is quite intuitive, the mission critical process of collecting and recognizing subscription revenue — going from Quote to Revenue (Q2R) — is highly complex. It touches many departmental functions within an enterprise, and consists of three main elements: configuring a price quote (CPQ), storing the associated billing information, and eventually reconciling the revenue (RevRec).

The current standard in Q2R software forces companies to maintain an independent system for each of these elements that are bolted together, with no high quality APIs to facilitate data transfer. For instance, when a sales rep creates a quote in your CPQ system, the finance department has to manually generate the corresponding invoice in the billing system. This duplicative effort leads to data fidelity issues, in addition to annoyance. Since the data coming out of the billing system is also leveraged for audits, there is no room for error. Tedious and costly duplication, from pricing, to product catalogs, to invoicing, cries out for a better solution. This is where Subskribe comes in.

Subskribe is building the first unified billing platform to handle the end-to-end Q2R workflow across all three modules.

By introducing the notion of “order-based invoicing”, Subskribe creates a single source of truth, enabling companies to run their direct sales, self-serve and partner channel revenues from one place without the need to duplicate information across disparate systems. This allows revenue operations to be nimbler than ever before and test flexible pricing structures required for dynamic deals, with support for discounts, bundles, and usage-based pricing. Like any modern software product, Subskribe is built with the broader ecosystem in mind, providing deep integrations into adjacent systems in the stack like Salesforce and Avalara.

Subskribe isn’t simply making subscriptions easy. They’re creating a cross-departmental system of record that allows each team to focus solely on their piece of the puzzle. The sales team can interact with customers and generate quotes, allowing the finance department to handle invoicing and payments. In turn, the data stored in the system empowers customer success and support teams to identify opportunities for upsell, better understand churn, and gain broader customer context for all their decisions. Finally, Subskribe provides the C-suite with a much more accurate view of how the business is performing on a daily basis.

The Subskribe team, much like its functionalities, is extremely impressive both individually and in sum, which was one of the principal reasons we decided to invest. Durga, Yibin and Prakash combine an encyclopedic understanding of billing with the engineering know-how required to build an elegant, end-to-end enterprise platform.

Subscriptions aren’t just a convenient, accessible way to pay for something — they’re a vote of confidence that an experience is worth having again and again. We firmly believe the same should be expected of your subscription management software. We are thrilled to support the Subskribe team in realizing this vision.

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