Announcing our $2.7m Pre-Seed Round

Introduction

The B2B SaaS market has become increasingly competitive with enterprise sales teams facing longer deal cycles, increased scrutiny from procurement teams, and tougher renewal conversations. Minoa, a startup that is building tools to help sellers articulate the value of their product for customers, today revealed that it has raised $2.7m in pre-seed funding to help sales reps overcome these challenges.

KEY INSIGHTS

The round is led by 468 Capital (Mesosphere Founder Florian Leibert) with participation from Mischief (Plaid Founder Zach Perret), AirAngels, Alumni Ventures, and Fidi Ventures. The company is also backed by a group of experienced angel investors including Front founder Mathilde Collin, podcast host Lenny Rachitsky and DocSend founder Russ Heddleston in addition to senior operators at Airbnb, Salesforce, and Amazon.

The funding will be put toward expanding Minoa’s engineering team in San Francisco (see open positions here).

About the company

The company was co-founded by Max Elster and Richard Einhorn who had seen first-hand that sales teams were increasingly ill-equipped to deal with customers’ demands for flexibility, detailed value cases, and custom deals.

“We are seeing that closing enterprise deals requires a lot more work from sales reps - A16z (1) and Forrester (2) reported a 60% increase in customer interactions - and that many software buyers are looking to drastically reduce the number of SaaS tools in their tech stack, yet documenting value and optimizing pricing remains difficult”, Einhorn explains. To win large enterprise deals and retain existing customers, sellers must gain a deep understanding of the buyer's business objectives and help them quantify the exact return on investment for buying a new piece of software.

“For most companies, value and pricing is a guessing game. B2B SaaS companies are building pricing models and ROI calculators in spreadsheets but they remain static and difficult to maintain. Companies that support their sales teams with value management and pricing tools see a much greater emphasis on value-selling and increased collaboration with buyers which often leads to a direct impact on win rates and deal size”, Elster continued. ”Similar to the way CRM systems established a framework for managing sales opportunities, we want to build the missing framework for modern B2B SaaS pricing and value selling.”

Value selling does not stop when the deal is signed and so Minoa works with customers to measure value realization and support renewal conversations. “We’re helping companies make better pricing decisions and provide customized offers to their customers using the data from across the customer lifecycle”, Elster said. Sales teams receive unique insights into the ‘willingness to pay’ of their clients.

About the round

Philipp Seifert, partner at 468 Capital who led Minoa’s recent round, added: “We believe that there is a tremendous opportunity for a category-defining business to be built at the intersection of pricing, value management, and quoting. Max and Richard have unparalleled insights into this space and they are bringing together an all-star team to go after this opportunity.”

The funding will be put toward expanding Minoa’s engineering team in San Francisco (see open positions here). “We believe that moving quickly requires us to build a lean team, be physically close, and develop strong relations with the local tech ecosystem”, Einhorn explains their decision to relocate to the Bay area from Europe.

About 468 Capital

468 Capital is a technology investment firm focused on supporting entrepreneurs with global ambitions. Founded in 2020, the firm invests in category defining businesses. The team at 468 Capital has a history of building, operating, and investing in successful technology companies. With offices in Berlin and San Francisco, 468 Capital provides strategic and financial support to entrepreneurs looking to grow their businesses internationally.

About Mischief

Mischief is an early-stage venture fund investing in pre-seed through series A software companies. Mischief specializes in having extensive high-growth operating experience with every partner, allowing them to uniquely help their 200+ companies as they scale.

About AirAngels

AirAngels is a venture fund and syndicate started by a group of Airbnb alumni in 2020. We've invested in over 100 transformational companies globally including Figma, Sorare, Cerebral, Alan, and Pachama. We're proud of our incredible group of LPs which are mostly Airbnb alumni and founders, as well as Tobi Lutke, Bill Ackman, David Sacks, Sequoia Capital, Marc Andreessen and more.

About Fidi Ventures

FiDi Ventures is an emerging venture capital fund built by successful entrepreneurs and operators - providing the earliest capital and operational expertise to promising entrepreneurs with exciting business opportunities. Founded in 2021, FiDi Ventures focuses on helping the next generation of great entrepreneurs build impactful, technology-driven companies across a broad range of industries

About Alumni Ventures

Alumni Ventures, a venture capital firm with over 8,000 investors and $1 billion in AUM, has grown to be one of the most active venture investors in the world and America's largest venture capital fund for individual investors. AV's biggest value add is connecting portfolio companies at their behest to this unique community of enthusiastic investors to supercharge customer acquisition, business development, and more.

REFERENCES

• (1) Forrester | Seismic Shifts That Amplify Long-Term Trends In Buying Behavior
• (2) a16z | The key to selling in a downturn—and showing customers why you’re valuable

‍