Growblocks, the fintech startup hailing from Copenhagen, has just secured a whopping $6 million in seed funding during a round led by Project A Ventures. This investment will offer a breath of fresh air to chief financial officers who have been struggling with inaccurate revenue projections. The round saw an impressive turnout of participants, including Headline and over 20 angel investors, as well as well-known SaaS founders like Ulrik Bo Larsen, Dave Kellogg, Chris Schagen, and Pieterjan Bouten.
Founded in 2021 by a team of B2B SaaS experts and self-proclaimed revenue aficionados, Growblocks is on a mission to help teams unleash their revenue potential and pave the way for sustainable growth for their companies.
At a time when investors get more cautious and double down on their companies’ paths to profitability, companies are slashing their costs, laying off staff to extend their runway, pulling out of geographies, and re-evaluating their sales forecasts.
Growblocks, a revenue planning & execution platform (RP&E) announces it has raised $6M in Seed funding to spare CFOs from the pains of inaccurate revenue projections.
“Revenue planning and execution are completely broken in today’s B2B Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Companies often focus on their top-down targets and rationalize their decisions based on assumptions and goals rather than real data. We can all see the consequences of this every other day in the news when a new round of layoffs is announced.” says Toni Hohlbein, CEO and co-founder of Growblocks.
The company was founded in 2021 by three veterans of hypergrowth SaaS companies: Toni Hohlbein (a former Chief Revenue Officer of Falcon.io and Planday), Olafur Palsson (previously COO at Templafy), and Andrew Dahl (already VP of Product at Falcon.io, CPO at Raffle) after they realized that the available software tools were only compounding the issue of unreasonable revenue goals. They were built for finance teams to control costs, but useless for revenue planning.
In fact, SaaS companies mostly still rely on massive excel sheets that are error-prone and difficult to update as the amount of data sources grows. While the cost side enjoys established standards and clear accounting regulations, the revenue side is neglected, with churn, customer lifetime value, and acquisition costs often calculated arbitrarily and based on abstract growth goals.
“Simply put: Companies often don’t really understand how their revenues are created, nor the actual costs of revenue creation. Relying solely on budgets and business targets without accounting for segments, markets, and people means that when the wind changes and things no longer go to plan, it’s incredibly hard to know where and when to intervene to generate the most impact.” continues Toni.
Superpowers for Chief Revenue Officers
Growblocks fixes the problem by putting a company’s real-time data funnel at work in a data-driven and scientific way to create robust bottom-up revenue plans. Commercial teams use it to create predictable revenue plans, conduct quarterly business reviews, and track performance against targets and initiatives.
“Every business needs a full-funnel operational model for their revenue. Growblocks’ operating model connects to all systems to visualize the entire funnel from traffic to churn. It enables businesses to predict where their revenue is coming from and gives them the ability to play out all possible scenarios ensuring they make the best decisions possible at every turn. When we were startup operators, we would have loved a tool that connected the planning of growth with the reality of driving it. As founders, we built it.” goes on Toni.
The Growblocks platform shows the baseline of what a business will achieve. Revenue leaders can create and compare different scenarios in order to reach desired growth numbers using accurate go-to-market data. Based on the chosen scenario, the revenue plan is created and executed in terms of tracking, making corrections, and reporting.
Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success teams can use Growblocks to check budget achievability, build project and hiring scenarios to support the revenue target, adjust resource allocation to optimize, and improve customer acquisition cost payback. Companies such as Dixa, Blinkist, and Lokalise already use Growblocks to drive their growth.
As Emīls Pauls Eglītis, RevOps Insights manager at localization platform Lokalise puts it: “Before, we just put money in a black box and see what came out of the other end. Now we can better understand where to invest and how it will turn out”
Monetized from Day 1
Growblocks, in line with its approach, has been building itself up carefully, monetizing from Day 1 with what the founders define as a “paper product” that has now progressed into a fully coded software solution. “Being able to earn actual money from our first-day operation was the best feedback we could ask for.” concludes Toni.
Growblock’s $6M Seed round is led by Project A Ventures, with participation from pre-seed lead Headline, bringing the total funding raised by the company so far to $8.5M.
20+ angel investors and fellow SaaS founders have invested in the company, including Ulrik Bo Larsen (founder of Falcon.io and Toni, Olafur, and Andrew’s former boss), Dave Kellogg, Chris Schagen (Contentful), and Pieterjan Bouten (Showpad).
“Strategic planning from a cost perspective has severe limitations for SaaS companies that are implementing operating plans. Most of these plans are not baked against actual operating data, and silos exacerbate this problem. Growblocks is mission control for revenue professionals and is solving this issue with a number of best-in-class companies. We’re delighted to be investing and working alongside the Growblocks team.” says Sam Cash, Partner at Project A.
“It’s not uncommon to see great companies struggle to turn raised capital into actual revenue growth. Almost anyone can plan, but translating those plans into actionable steps is very hard. There is a massive demand for modern treasury management solutions. Among them, Growblocks is the only one that makes full use of a company’s data sources to build scenarios of the project and hiring plans that support revenue targets.” says Jonathan Becker, Partner at Headline.
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