Correlated announced Wednesday that it has raised $8.3 Million in seed financing to launch its product-led platform for growth and sales teams.NextView Ventures was the lead investor in the round, along with Apollo Projects, Attentive cofounders Brian Long, Andrew Jones, Attentive cofounders Andrew Jones, Harrison Metal, Attentive cofounders Brian Long, Attentive cofounders Ben Darnell, and Atriums Pete Kazanjy. TechCrunch has learned that the round includes funding from last year as well as more recent follow-on funding, according to Tim Geisenheimer, co-founder and CEO.Geisenheimer, Diana Hsieh and John Pena founded the New York-based company in 2020. They had previously worked together at TimescaleDB and John Pena. Geisenheimer met Pena at Facet. They saw the need to link product data and sales tools in their previous roles.Geisenheimer, who was working at Timescale, said that there were thousands upon thousands of users available to chat to. He and Hsieh created a similar product-led growth platform, but secretly wished Correlated was more readily available.They saw data from multiple tools stored on spreadsheets in order to generate actionable insights. This data would soon become obsolete. You should also consider that customers now use products in a different way. Customers would have to talk to sales to be able use a product. Customers can now use products free of charge and get value or not. However, sales teams don't have any real-time data about their experiences.Geisenheimer stated that sales must know the customer's experience with the product, and when the sales team should engage them based on their maturity. This was missing and sales teams often ended up talking to the wrong people. They can close more deals with Correlated.Correlateds technology pulls product usage data from tools, data warehouses, and connects it to a management platform such as Salesforce or HubSpot. It stitches the data together to create a data graph that shows how customers use a product. A salesperson might be able to see how many employees log in to a company with 200-500 employees and be alerted when there is a good opportunity to sell.The company uses a SaaS pricing model, and has already begun working with mid-market firms like Ally, Pulumi and ReadMe. Geisenheimer plans to use the funding to hire across all functions, including engineering and go-to market, in support of its beta launch. The company currently has 11 employees.Other product-led growth platforms have raised venture capital funding in recent years, such as Endgame. Geisenheimer stated that the competition is often internal product teams creating their own systems. He said that Correlated's unique feature is that it has done the task and customers can quickly see the value once they are running.David Beisel is co-founder and partner of NextView Ventures. His firm invests in category-stage companies. It currently operates out of its fourth fund which infuses business-to-business SaaS companies and ecommerce companies. Geisenheimer has been a friend of Beisel for almost ten years. They first met when NextView invested at TapCommerce, Geisenheimers' previous company.Beisel stated that Tim knows sales and that the company sells a product with strong founder market fit. We are moving towards a world in which end-user adoption and not initial engagement is increasing over time. Correlated instead empowers account expansion and initial sales, which aligns with the future direction of the industry.
