Teams dedicated to driving customer acquisition, retention, and sales don’t necessarily have the time or tools to use data insights effectively. In a 2019 surveyNewVantage partners discovered that the The percentage of companies reporting they are data-driven has fallen over the past three years, with more than half admitting they are not competing in data and analytics.
That’s why Ariel Maislos, who sold semiconductor startup Anobit to Apple for $400 million in 2012, teamed up with Itamar Falcon and Michael Ehrlich to Coho AIa product-driven revenue optimization platform designed to give businesses, especially software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies, access to insights for upsell and growth.
Coho AI announced today that it has raised $8.5 million in a seed funding round led by Eight Roads, TechAviv and angel investors. CEO Falcon says the capital will be spent on product R&D and expanding Coho AI’s team, which currently numbers 17 people.
“Coho AI has developed a unique data consolidation platform that models and maps the business value of a software-as-a-service company to customer behavior in real time using machine learning and advanced analytics,” Falcon told businesskinda.com. in an email interview. “Coho AI’s behavioral modeling enables personalized customer journeys that improve conversion metrics and help revenue teams, from sales and customer success, along with product teams achieve higher growth and sales efficiency.”
Coho AI’s target audience is sales, customer success, and product teams within business-to-business (B2B) SaaS companies. The platform provides AI models to discover what makes a product “sticky” and what drives users to upgrade to a paid B2B SaaS plan, as well as real-time usage models to identify upsell opportunities and churn risks and segmentation models to identify different users based on their behavior.
Falcon says all models were trained using anonymized data from Coho Ai’s customer base. “By doing this, we create a network effect that each of our clients gets the benefits of a larger data set, resulting in a more accurate model,” he added.
In addition to the AI-driven features, Coho AI provides a single source of truth from which sales, product, and customer success teams can pull data on both users and accounts. An observation dashboard enables growth teams to identify where users are in the customer journey and tailor a specific experience to reduce outages, while real-time triggers highlight growth opportunities including “free-to-play” and upsells .
“There is skepticism among SaaS leaders about whether a third-party tool can model their unique product value and turn it into actionable insights for go-to-market teams,” said Falcon. “[But] Coho AI really helps companies improve metrics like net income retention and sales efficiency, which have become more important in the current economic climate.”
Coho AI competes with startups including Correlated and Endgame, but Falcon says the company already has “dozens” of customers and partners. However, he declined to provide sales figures.
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