Montréal-based Vasco has secured $8 million USD ($11.5 million CAD) in seed funding to help startups commercialize through its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered revenue operations (RevOps) platform.
“One of the top reasons why great innovation doesn’t make it to the world is because [it] fails in commercialization.”
Guillaume Jacquet
Vasco
Vasco’s revenue management platform aims to solve go-to-market challenges and eliminate revenue blindspots for startups so they can scale effectively. The company says the funding will go towards enhancing the platform’s AI solutions and expanding its client base globally.
Inovia Capital led the all-equity, all-primary round, with participation from BY Venture Partners, FRAMEWORK Venture Partners, and angel investors.
“There’s a science behind scaling businesses,” co-founder and CEO Guillaume Jacquet said in an interview with BetaKit. “We have a firm belief that go-to-market fit for [business-to-business (B2B)] companies is as important as product-market fit.”
Vasco positions itself as a startup built to serve startups and scaleups, from their prototyping phase to maturity. But it targets a specific pain point: the go-to-market phase, after the startup has proven product-market fit and filled a strong customer demand. Here, Jacquet said, is where most companies hit “the biggest bottleneck.”
“In B2B companies … one of the top reasons why great innovation doesn’t make it to the world is because they fail in commercialization,” he said.
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For venture-backed startups, data supports the notion that go-to-market is where companies falter in Canada. A recent report by Charles Plant through the Narwhal Project found that of 260 Canadian tech companies founded in 2014, only 8.4 percent made it to a Series B funding round. Plant argued that the crux of the problem lies in marketing and sales failures.
As a company grows, Jacquet said, different streams of revenue generation become siloed: sales, marketing, and customer success work on different datasets and tech stacks. Vasco aims to unite these teams through its RevOps platform, where insights are centralized and teams can evaluate the impact of a marketing campaign in one place.
Vasco integrates real-time data about marketing, sales, and customer success alongside a workforce management tool. This allows companies to map out revenue targets on a timeline and assign team members to different tasks, tracking individual and team contributions.
“We take the data from your enterprise, we analyze them, and we show you the zones where you’re performing and where you’re wasting your energy,” Jacquet said.
Vasco claims the AI RevOps copilot, called Gama AI, identifies the causes of revenue gaps and suggests strategies to improve revenue generation. Gama AI sifts through data and generates scores for different phases of the customer journey, such as awareness, closing, onboarding, retention, and expansion. Jacquet declined to disclose which large-language model Gama AI is built on, but said it was “one of the best.”
Other features of Vasco’s platform include a data health monitoring tool, which identifies weaknesses in revenue trajectory, as well as a customizable reporting tool to evaluate customer profiles.
Jacquet’s previous experience as a founder sparked his interest in a broader approach to RevOps. ChronoGolf, his golf management software startup and first venture, was acquired by Lightspeed in 2019. All four of its founders moved to Lightspeed, with Jacquet becoming Lightspeed’s executive vice-president of product and technology and his ChronoGolf co-founder, JD St-Martin becoming the company’s president.
The investment from Inovia follows a decade-long relationship with the firm after it backed ChronoGolf.
In 2022, Jacquet left Lightspeed to launch Vasco alongside co-founder and CTO Sébastien Rothlisberger, who had served as senior architect of technology at Lightspeed.
Vasco’s customers include Lightspeed and Montréal-based Connect & Go, both of whom have endorsed the product. The company is also a certified partner of Winning by Design, RevGenius, and Pavilion—SaaS consultancies whose expertise helped inform Vasco’s product, Jacquet said.
Vasco’s ultimate goal is for its platform to make it into the hands of as many go-to-market leaders and RevOps teams as possible. Right now, their team has just over 20 employees and is looking to grow over the next year.
“We use Vasco every day to understand how Vasco is doing,” he said. “As a user of your own platform, you’re much more severe to what your platform should be doing.”
Feature image courtesy Scott Graham via Unsplash.