Customer onboarding platform Rocketlane nabs $18M

Rocketlane, a platform that SaaS businesses use to onboard new customers and help reduce churn, has raised $18 million in a series A round of funding.

The problem that Rocketlane is setting out to solve is that getting customers to sign up to a new software product is only half the battle — keeping them on board, by showing them exactly how they can benefit from it, is what will ultimately help the SaaS company thrive.

“The number one problem Rocketlane solves for enterprises is poor onboarding — delayed and botched implementations which often lead to abandonment of purchased software, and subsequently churn,” Rocketlane cofounder and CEO Srikrishnan Ganesan told VentureBeat. “It [Rocketlane] powers a collaborative experience for businesses to work with their customers, purpose-built for repeatable customer-facing projects.”

An onboarding ‘system of record’

At its core, Rocketlane pitches itself as a “system of record” for everything that happens around a new customer’s onboarding. It replaces various generic collaboration, communication, and project management tools such as Asana, Slack, and Google Docs with a single unified platform that businesses can use to work both with colleagues and the end-users. And by connecting directly with CRM (customer relationship management) systems, companies can synchronize data across their customer-centric channels.

Aside from CRMs, Rocketlane also supports the flow of information and notifications across various enterprise tools such as JIRA and Slack.

But perhaps more than all that, Rocketlane promises visibility into all customer onboarding projects, with insights into which ones are falling behind schedule and where customer sentiment may be starting to wane.

Above: Rocketlane offers visibility into all customer onboarding projects

Founded in 2020, Rocketlane had previously closed a $3 million seed round of funding, and for its latest cash injection the San Mateo, California and India-based company attracted 8VC as lead investor — 8VC has previously backed companies such as Asana and Oculus. Participating investors include Nexus Venture Partners, Matrix Partners India, and angel investor Gokul Rajaram.

Rocketlane exists in a broader digital adoption sphere that counts companies such as WalkMe and Whatfix, which are designed to encourage uptake by embedding user-focused help features such as tip balloons and other other overlays into their products. Rocketlane tackles a similar problem, but from a different perspective — it’s all about replacing multiple separate tools to collaborate directly with the customer through a single interface.

“Customer onboarding for SaaS businesses is an emerging enterprise category in its own right, encompassing a massive and growing user community,” 8VC partner and CTO Bhaskar Ghosh said in a statement.  “It represents a new two-sided project management problem, and the resulting complexity requires a bespoke solution — it simply cannot be addressed by a patchwork of existing project management tools.”