SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Apr 18, 2014) - Preact, the cloud-based, automatic customer success service, today officially announced the launch of the first service that helps subscription software companies maximize the lifetime value of their customers using leading-edge behavioral science, machine learning, and big-data analytics.
The company also announced that it closed $4.6 million in Series A funding led by Trinity Ventures. Karan Mehandru, General Partner at Trinity Ventures, joined the Board of Directors. Prior investors Atlas Ventures, Karlin Ventures, Bee Partners, and Lion Wells Capital also participated. Funds will be used to grow the product team and expand sales and marketing efforts.
Preact helps subscription software companies maximize customer lifetime value by reducing churn, acquiring more paying customers, and driving upsells. Preact automatically predicts and highlights the individual users and accounts that are likely to churn and/or upgrade. The company integrates its data into common workflow applications including Gmail, Marketo, Salesforce, Zendesk, Desk.com, and others. It currently works with more than 40 customers, including Adomic, Bitium, Doctorbase, EatClub, Education.com, Lettuce, Propertybase, and RJMetrics.
"Today, it's far more profitable for software companies to keep customers than find new ones, which is why growing recurring revenues is the most cost-effective way to drive long-term value," said Michael Geller, CEO. "We're seeing rapidly accelerating demand from sales and customer success teams who need accurate analysis of the health and activity of their customers so they can act proactively to save or upsell them."
"Preact is a critical part of the foundation underlying our Customer Success team; it's already made our entire team at least 25% more productive," said Robert J. Moore, CEO of RJMetrics, a Preact customer. "By quickly highlighting the precise customers in need of the most immediate attention, Preact is having a significantly positive effect on our retention and upsell rates."
Gartner estimated that more than $250 billion will be spent on public cloud services in 2017, and Forrester estimated the U.S. eCommerce industry will be as large as $370 billion in 2017.
"Preact takes customer success analytics to an entirely new level. Instead of relying on static rules and guesswork, Preact uses proprietary data science to automatically measure the health of every user and account on a granular level," said Karan Mehandru, General Partner, Trinity Ventures. "This combination of extreme ease of use, advanced data science, and actionability enables businesses to keep tabs on their customers, reduce churn, and increase per-customer revenues. We're thrilled to partner with Preact by funding the next phase of their growth."