Using data to make better decisions faster helps startups in the crowded SaaS space improve product development, identify hidden market opportunities, and finish the job with fewer false steps, important priorities as these startups seek some of the booming SaaS market, which is expected to grow by 19.7% over the next six years.
A Singapore and California-based startup called Household items has built a platform that ingests data to help startups with these efforts. Today, Houseware is coming out of hiding with $2.2 million led by Tanglin Ventures Partners with participation from GTMfund and Better Capital, along with angel investors from some of the most iconic and mature SaaS companies, including executives from Snowflake, Superhuman, Stripe, Zendesk and others.
When Houseware co-founder and CEO Divyansh Saini worked for data analytics company Atlan, he had the chance to work directly with companies like WeWork, Postman and Plaid. Saini noticed a disconnect between how data teams were talking about, say, metrics and what revenue teams were demanding from those numbers.
“[Traditionally,] the data team is further removed from the issues and treated as a service function,” said Saini, spending weeks modeling data for particular use cases.
Houseware was founded in 2021 by Shubhankar Srivastava and Saini with a simple question: “What would it take to move the value of the data warehouse from the data and engineering teams to the revenue function within organizations?
Houseware, which provides an easy-to-use, no-code interface for operations and revenue teams, wants to bring SaaS companies closer to using data more efficiently in their everyday use cases across the enterprise.
Houseware allows users, for example, in the customer success team, to model product pricing information, which in turn can then be used by finance teams when considering how to change those prices, explained Saini.
This is important because while products like Snowflake have made it easier to work with large volumes of data at scale over the past five years, revenue teams at most companies are still untouched by this paradigm shift. , according to Saini.
Houseware’s target customers are SaaS companies with more than 1,000 employees. The company says its end users are revenue, marketing, and sales groups, as well as marketing and financial analysts. Houseware tracks the percentage of employees enabled as a key metric across companies using its platform.
“We’ve seen up to 30% of employees in an organization being regular users of household items,” said Saini, who likes to talk about “democratizing access.” It has onboarded users from public SaaS companies and the fastest growing edtech and SaaS companies, among others, in the past two quarters.
Household items consider Clarity And People.ai its closest competitors, alongside some horizontal platforms like Thoughtspot, Saini told TechCrunch. He also pointed out that companies like Retool, which raised $45 million at a valuation of $3.2 billion last yearand Streamlit, who acquired Snowfake for $800 million, have made the space popular for developers and data scientists, respectively; Houseware aims to do the same for non-technical users.
Saini told TechCrunch that he is “currently building a layer of intelligence on top of customer data using machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to solve business cases. ‘use such as identifying churn risk’ and ‘creating smart account health scores’. in addition to customer data. The startup is looking to roll them out to its customers in the second and third quarters of 2023, Saini added.
The company also plans to grow its team, hire for marketing positions in the United States, and double down on its partnerships with Snowflake and dbt Labs.
“Revenue executives are under tremendous pressure to find avenues for growth,” Saini said in a statement. “Investors are focused on a strong unit economy and on the path to profitability, so a lot will hinge on strong, disciplined, first-decile trade execution.”
Picture credits: Household items
“Data and metrics have come into focus over the past six months in SaaS companies, with board meetings now seeking answers about the cost of customer acquisition, which primary channels work best, or how ‘Use of the products is tied to unsubscribing,’ Saini said in his statement.