Our investment in ProductEngine

Everything we consume and use that is produced and sold in this world, at some point, had a price and the vast majority were identified by a SKU (stock keeping unit) – everything. Use a device, or sit in your living room, your office, or your car and look around, the built environment is made up of items and materials that had to be priced and identified.

Pricing and product ID are complex, multivariate and create an ongoing dilemma for businesses. It is a constant challenge to maintain this information dynamically, and for businesses to make better and faster sales and invoicing decisions without investing more time, effort or resources in the management of this information. 

How complex can it be? Well, imagine just 5 products that could be purchased together (or not), with 4 different pricing levels and discounts – that's 244,140,625 different variable invoicing outputs that could be managed dynamically. It's complex just at low levels. True pricing complexity — thousands of products for tens of thousands of customers—becomes a completely different problem for industries such as telecommunications, wholesaling, IT services and retail, where spreadsheets are overwhelmingly used to manage the pricing of bundled and complex products. 

The development of a single source for sales reps that can unlock pricing coordination and opportunities is a big opportunity when the majority of pricing decisions tend to be based on across-the-board pricing resulting in significant losses. Not to mention, quoting complex products can be time consuming and prone to human error, which can cost businesses time, money and lost returns.

The technology to make pricing management more effective exists, but what we haven’t had is a single platform that simplifies the management, collaboration, sync and tracking of product and pricing information. Until ProductEngine.

Why product and pricing matter

As long as businesses have products to sell and stock to track across suppliers, manufacturers and vendors, they will need to manage product and pricing information. ProductEngine’s team is solving an issue that is relevant across a number of sectors, opening up a $2.1B (and growing) global market that is yet to be monetised.

The lifeblood of any business is getting products to its customers on time; staying on top of inventory and managing it efficiently helps meet demand and generate sales. This is where ProductEngine comes in. 

Since launching in 2019, ProductEngine has helped reduce the time to quote from five days to five minutes, meaning fewer missed deadlines and lost sales. ProductEngine does this work at speed and scale, whilst also offering greater visibility across the business, reduced risk of error, and dynamic enablement. 

Solving for product and pricing improvement and efficiency is just the start. What Matt, Jarrad and the team are building now will ultimately lead to better output in downstream applications, such as pipeline reporting (CRM). They’re creating a foundational system that spans an entire organisation’s functions and time zones to allow each team to focus solely on their piece of the puzzle. The sales team can interact with customers and generate quotes, allowing the finance department to handle invoicing and payments. In turn, the data stored in the system empowers customer success and support teams to identify opportunities for upselling, better understand churn and gain broader customer context for all their decisions. 

From squad to partners 

Co-founders Matt Hollis and Jarrad Seers have worked together for over nine years and together have a combined 20 years that spans commercial and technical knowledge. When we first met, through Startmate’s Office Hours, it was clear that the team understood that product-led growth is what ultimately scales a SaaS company and therefore what they needed to develop as founders. 

In Matt and Jarrad, we see qualities we love in founders: the willingness to acknowledge one’s own blind spots, and the unique insight and keen ambition to actively overcome them in order to build a company that outlasts the founders themselves. 

ProductEngine is currently in private beta with key customers. With the fundraise, the team will grow and scale to set up for international expansion. 

We are delighted to partner with Matt, Jarrad and their team by leading ProductEngine’s $1.2M seed round. We have no doubt that ProductEngine is building a technology company that will solve a global problem of immediate pricing and product management pain points and, looking ahead, we believe there’s so much more this founding team can do to enable effective decision making for businesses.