VELARIS: SUPERCHARGING GLOBAL B2B SAAS ENTERPRISES

SaaS enthusiasts Dilanka Kalutota and José Fernández-Castaño founded Velaris in 2021 to address the troubling gap in the B2B SaaS industry. Having built their careers within the B2B SaaS industry, from startups to well-established giants, they decided to tackle a reoccurring problem: a disconnect between an organization and its customers. A problem exacerbated by the upheavals in the business world and rapid changes in how people work and consume caused by Covid-19. Dilanka, Chief Executive at Velaris, and José, its COO, combined to find a solution and build a new-age customer platform for B2B companies. Dilanka shares insight into how Velaris solves the customer data disconnection problem and its exciting growth prospects.

Why was Velaris conceived? What is the problem you are solving?

We have seen the emergence of several successful B2B SaaS businesses like Zoom, Slack, HubSpot, Tableau and Stripe, gaining multibillion-dollar crazy valuations within a short period. Some of these businesses have not existed for more than ten years, which means that any B2B SaaS can potentially become a super unicorn if they have the secret sauce: solving a big problem and ensuring their solutions are actually fixing the problem as intended and benefitting customers.

One of the drivers of these crazy valuations is a metric called Net Revenue Retention (NRR). NRR with 140% means you’re growing 40% year-on-year without adding new customers to your business book. You do this by upselling and cross-selling to your existing customers.

Great NRR numbers helped those unicorn companies I mentioned earlier to get those valuations. Every B2B SaaS business aspires to hit that sweet spot NRR, but it is not easy.

Who is responsible for NRR in a business? In a B2B SaaS business, it is the Customer Success Team. Customer success jobs are among the top in-demand jobs today, with demand for CSMs and Chief Customer Officers growing exponentially in the last 12 months.

However, there is still a significant gap. The biggest problem for B2B SaaS Customer Success Teams is not having a 360-degree view of their customers. Therefore, Customer Success Teams struggle to understand their customers and have to come up with half-baked strategies for making their customers successful.

Customer-centricity is crucial to any business. Velaris has a Customer Data Platform providing that much-needed single-customer view with Intelligence and Execution built on top of it. With Velaris, Customer Success teams can be more proactive than reactive, and product and leadership teams can make the right choices regarding customer strategy. The ultimate result would be higher NRR.

How does Velaris help B2B companies become customer-centric?

Modern-day SaaS businesses contend with multiple customer data and touchpoints on top of multi-discipline processes is challenging. Vital data is scattered, hidden or disconnected, siloed in various functional departments of a business. It is daunting to collate them into meaningful information that can inform a B2B SaaS business of how successful or impactful their platforms are with customers.

Another challenge is the sheer volume, variety, and velocity of customer data that now exists can be overwhelming. That is where Velaris comes to the rescue.

We aim to fix the disconnected data problem and create a Single Customer View, an increasingly indispensable asset for any business. We founded Velaris during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic when the world of work and how we collaborate had dramatically changed, making customer journeys more complicated, entrenching data deeper within their silos, and making a solution to this problem a crying need.

We exist to enable B2B enterprises achieve greater heights by bringing the customer to the centre of an organization. In other words, we supercharge Customer Success Teams within B2B SaaS businesses, thereby enabling those businesses to achieve high levels of NRR simply by upselling and cross-selling to their customer base.

The 360-degree view of our platform allows Customer Success Teams in a B2B SaaS business to understand product adoption and gauge customer feedback. We also provide critical data that Customer Success Teams can use to effectively and seamlessly cross-sell and upsell, thereby retaining customers, building loyalty and increasing their lifetime value to a B2B SaaS business.

Velaris goes above and beyond the needs of Customer Success Teams. We have extended our solutions to the decision-makers, management, and other strategic teams in a B2B SaaS business to drive value from deep customer insights. For example, product teams can strategise their roadmap based on the adoption metrics and feedback received by end users. CEOs can utilise our platform to evaluate pricing and go-to-market strategies with the revenue teams. We also believe Velaris could be used to understand and monitor the efficiency of the client services teams as and when a business scales. Those are some of the ways that we can help. We do have an execution engine on our platform.

As mentioned earlier, we have a Customer Data Platform and an intelligence layer to convert disconnected data into meaningful information and actionable insights. What is the use of actionable insights if we cannot execute flawlessly? We help our customers with that, too, with our execution layer of the platform.

How would you define the culture at Velaris?

Since launching in 2021, Velaris has grown exponentially, gaining traction among B2B SaaS enterprises in Europe, especially in the UK, Spain, and Germany. I would define Velaris as a unique bunch of problem solvers, designers, engineers, and developers, living and working across the globe, united by the desire to change the world of Customer Success. Our people live and work by a set of values that define who we are, called The Velarian DNA: Be bold and own it; Never settle; Good vibes; Practice Karuna; and We are better together.

What are your goals for expansion and growth?

We recently raised $4.6 million in a seed round to drive AI-powered customer success. The investment was led by Octopus Ventures and backed by VCs, Zaka, and Fintech 365. We will use the funds to build machine learning capabilities into our platform to enable businesses to derive better insights that will lead to better NRRs. We also intend to develop our R&D capabilities and expand our presence in Sri Lanka, London, and Madrid.