Today, the world runs on SaaS products. Speaking to Arteculate, Co-Founder of Velaris, Dilanka Kalutota shares that companies behind large SaaS products “have net retention rates over 100%, which means they can still grow year-on-year without any new year business.” However, getting to this point is no easy task. The reality is that it remains a difficult feat to pull off without the right technology. But the company is determined to conquer this challenge and empower B2B SaaS organizations everywhere to understand and better serve their customers.
Founded by Dilanka and Jose, Velaris today has a presence in London and Madrid and an engineering arm in Sri Lanka. Recently the company closed its pre-seed funding round. The company is now expanding its team. As it blazes ahead on its journey to transform customer success, its founders envision Velaris as a success story that inspires the next wave of Sri Lankan entrepreneurs to build disruptive products and services.
How Velaris is redefining customer relationships
Velaris is a powerful Customer Success Platform designed to help B2B SaaS businesses manage, analyze, and predict customer relationships. According to research by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company, a 5% increase in customer retention will result in higher profits ranging from 25% to 95%. Therefore, Velaris steps in as a company’s strategic solution for net revenue retention by growing the business through upselling and cross-selling,” he highlights.
Conventionally, most B2B organizations struggle with delivering true customer centricity. It starts with a mindset shift to prioritize and understand the customer inside-out. Yet, this becomes complicated due to several cross-functional customer touchpoints on top of the multi-discipline processes modern businesses have in place. As a result, customer data tends to be scattered across several systems, resulting in a complex and broken perspective. Whereas, Velaris provides an interface to a siloed data structure that equips enterprises with a 360-degree view of the business. This understanding helps organizations avoid giving half-baked solutions to their customers, leading to better relationships.
Led by two SaaS experts: The journey of Velaris
Velaris was created to step in and help businesses differentiate themselves from their competition with a unique experience enabling them to offer greater value to customers consistently. “It’s incredibly hard to build successful software businesses today without listening to the customer’s heartbeat. Therefore Customer Success should not just be a team but a practice/ritual within these organizations,” Dilanka shares. The duo and their team envision Velaris as the ultimate customer success platform, making data available to the entire organization.
Since its founding, Velaris has grown rapidly. The company raised its pre-seed round in 2021 and recently completed its seed round of funding of US$ 5 million in March 2022, led by Octopus Ventures, one of the Tier 1 Venture Capital firms in the UK, and led by Zaka and Fintech 365. The team began onboarding talent from Sri Lanka in March 2021, which is now 21-strong and expanding.
Commenting on their fast-paced growth, José shared, “Understanding this economic landscape, customer success teams are uniquely positioned to help their companies weather the downturn through retention and expansion of existing revenues. We’re thrilled to enable customer success teams with a truly innovative and game-changing solution. With Octopus Ventures’ belief in Velaris, we can democratize customer experience data and empower customer success teams to have a greater impact across the company.”
The culture at Velaris
Dilanka and Jose have instilled a fun and accessible work environment at Velaris. The company’s flat hierarchy puts the entire team into a single hardworking unit tackling all problems coming their way. The team dedicates its one hundred percent to its product development and strongly believes in getting every feature perfect. “How we behave during tough times and treat each other defines our winning culture at Velaris,” highlights Dilanka. To this, the team boasts five fundamental values that define its fellow Velarians:
- Be bold and own it
- Never settle
- Good vibes
- Practise karuna (compassion or empathy + +)
- Being better together
The team is now opening its doors to new Velarians to join their force and be part of one of Europe’s fastest-growing tech companies. Senior full-stack engineers, data engineers, and AI & ML engineers are presented with an opportunity to be some of the first employees of an undoubtedly 1-billion-dollar company in the years to come. Dilanka adds, “Most of us are afraid to take that step in becoming entrepreneurs and going from zero to one. We hope that by being part of an early-stage startup such as ours, we would inspire them, in turn, to carry this winning mindset and recreate their journeys.”
The Future of Velaris as it revolutionizes customer success
As Velaris expands to more markets across Europe, Dilanka conveys that the next step for the team is to create a complete Go To Market function. This would help bring in the next level of the product, covering areas of sales, customer success, implementation, support, and marketing. In addition, the dev team at Velaris is also focusing on building an intelligence level using AI and ML to enhance the platform’s predictive aspect and provide actionable insights. Speaking on the success Velaris has had in its short one-and-a-half-year journey, Conor Scanlan from Octopus Ventures believes that “Velaris and its brilliant team of individuals are changing the world with its hyper-focus on user experience. Undoubtedly, adding AI and Machine Learning will entirely alter the space with the powerful product they built in under a year.”
To be a part of Velaris and its game-changing journey ahead, get in touch with the team by reaching out through its website: https://www.velaris.io/careers