Unlocking the revenue in software
Today, we’re excited to announce our $14 million Series A round, led by Menlo Ventures and joined by new and existing investors including Greylock, South Park Commons, base case capital, Scribble Ventures, and founders and executives at the forefront of enterprise software. This brings our total raised to $19.1 million and will enable us to accelerate our mission to provide every business with the infrastructure to unlock their revenue.
Our story
Kshitij and I worked together as engineering leaders at Asana for five years, during a time when the company underwent major changes to pricing and packaging. While incredibly successful for customers and for the business, those initiatives were massively painful for both engineering and finance.
We saw first-hand the enormity of the challenges companies face when trying to drive revenue growth at scale. Even with just a subscription-only SaaS model, we needed complete flexibility and full control over how products were billed and monetized. We found it counterintuitive that billing tools often constrain and dictate what teams can try out. They should, instead, enable the flexibility to meet customers where they are.
The trend towards usage-based pricing has accelerated in recent years, and so has the hype around it. You might have heard that the consumption economy is the new subscription economy. The reality, of course, is more complex: there is no one-size-fits all approach to pricing.
What is for everyone is some way to creatively weave elements of product usage into a flexible pricing strategy, aligning value with customers to incentivize expansion and retention. That will most often be a hybrid pricing model combining subscription fees, seats, usage-based prices, and usage-based tiers. Businesses need complete control to price and package their products in the way that best drives efficient growth. Flexibility and control is what Orb delivers.
To date, we’ve powered billing for high-growth companies including Airbyte, Materialize, and Stytch, serving as one of their most mission-critical systems. We’re close partners to their engineering, product, finance, and revops teams. With this latest round of funding, we’ll grow our team and work to fulfill our mission of providing every business with the infrastructure they need to unlock their revenue.
Why we’re building Orb
There’s something particularly magical about putting software to work on points of leverage. On those gnarly, unglamorous pipes that handle sensitive data or critical business workflows, and keep things chugging along. Focused effort into these points of leverage is a superpower. We gain and give control back to focus on what we’re uniquely good at.
Two years ago, when we founded Orb, this idea of leverage was central to our mission. We began by thinking through the very fundamental proposition around what allows companies to grow: creating value (by building a great product) and the ability to capture it (by monetizing it).
Despite skeptical takes, we’re convinced that now, more than ever, the tools that Silicon Valley is building are important and useful for the world. Especially with the explosion of SaaS, infrastructure services, and AI, the value that companies are creating compounds quickly.
But companies are struggling to effectively capture the value they create. They are unable to experiment with pricing and don’t have the flexibility to meet customers where they are. We’re pained to see so many companies having to devote so much of their engineering team to building revenue infrastructure, under-leveraging their finance and revops teams, and having their sales and customer success teams flying blind.
At Orb, we believe you shouldn’t have to take this on alone.
Pricing and packaging can seem like a back office activity or numbers analysis far removed from product innovation or customers. In reality, it’s a crucial point of trust and leverage to deliver customer value. It’s a surface area that spans just about every team, from product and engineering, to customer success and finance. Building revenue infrastructure isn’t just about collecting money efficiently; it’s much larger than that. It’s about building better relationships with your customers. Solving that problem is a point of leverage, and Orb helps you do that.
Onwards
What we’re working on doesn’t come with a splash. It doesn’t. If we do our jobs right, it’s our customers’ success that will shine the most. We’re not here to make a splash; we’re here to exercise the superpower of software against this point of leverage so that companies of the next 10+ years can be effective at what they do best.
Want to never work on billing again? Schedule a demo. Want to work on billing every day? We’re hiring.
Ready to solve billing?
