CustomerSuccessBox, a customer management software start-up, has raised $1 million in pre-Series A funding led by pi Ventures with participation from Axilor Ventures, which is backed by Kris Gopalakrishnan and SD Shibulal.

CustomerSuccessBox was founded in 2016 by Puneet Kataria, Founder & CEO, who comes from a marketing background and Amritpal Singh Co-founder & CTO, who has product development experience.

pi Ventures was launched in August 2016 by Manish Singhal, angel investor and co-founder and former CEO of online deals platform LetsVenture, and Umakant Soni, an IIT Kanpur alumnus and entrepreneur who makes early stage investments in AI-focussed start-ups. The funding will be used to drive growth and additional features to the product, which does a business-health check-up by using data.

Change in mindset

One of the reasons ventures eye this space is for the change in mindset of businesses that are buying software on subscription basis as their business processes get digitalised.

“The world is moving towards an operational-expenses kind of business model similar to Netflix,” said Abishek Surendran, Partner pi Ventures. In such a world, retaining a customer is considered of prime importance as marketing dollars continue to get spent to acquire customers. According to Puneet Kataria, Founder & CEO, CustomerSuccessBox, businesses using subscription-based software bleed, churn and struggle with customer retention. If a customer leaves after a few months of enrolling, businesses suffer as they do not break even on the customer acquisition costs, said Manish Singhal, Founding Partner, pi Ventures, adding that businesses could get a “real time health check-up” of their ventures.

Investors like pi Ventures have lined up a $30-million fund corpus to make early stage investments in such start-ups. The VC firm marked the first close of its fund in March last year with investors such as Aarin Capital Chairman TV Mohandas Pai, Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal, MakeMyTrip’s Deep Kalra and Info Edge’s Sanjeev Bikchandani. International Finance Corporation, the World Bank’s private-sector investment arm, and VC firm Accel Partners have also invested in the fund.

Customer churn

Customer churn is an issue that is getting attention as businesses start to realise that it makes sense to reduce customer churn instead of spending money on acquiring them, said Sanchit Vir Gogia, Founder, Greyhound Research. This, in turn, is turning out to be a $240-billion opportunity globally, which is drawing the attention of multinational tech giants like Microsoft, SalesForce and others.

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