Berlin-based SaaS startup emlen has closed a $4.2 million seed funding round to create a “Netflix-like” buyer experience for B2B sales. This seed round is being co-led by coparion and Montan-Ventures-Saar, along with existing investors Holzer Group as well as experienced angel investors from the leadership team of Personio and the founders of Finoa. The new round raises the total funding to $5.3 million in less than 12 months after the company was founded.
emlen tackles the challenge that 81% of today’s B2B buyers expect a B2C customer experience – just as they experience when consuming content on Netflix or shopping quickly and easily on Amazon. The three founders had always asked themselves why it’s not possible to create a similar experience in the process of purchasing software, services or technology in the B2B environment. Currently, it’s a cumbersome and complicated process, often involving several tools and touchpoints from the beginning of the journey to the deal closing, and it does not provide an individually tailored experience for the buyer.
After the rather old-fashioned trend of „Sales-Led Growth“, which focused entirely on the strengths of sales employees, and the new-fashioned trend of „Product-Led Growth“, which focuses more on the process after a successful deal, emlen predicts the future of a „Buyer-Led Growth“ focus, which puts the buyer in the center and makes it easy for him to take actions independently at the right time.
With emlen, sales and marketing organizations can create individualized destinations for each buyer in seconds, without IT or coding skills, and conduct the entire communication process within the destination, from the provision of content to deal closing, and finally to the handover to customer success. The buyer can pull the information himself or take action he needs – all with the goal of enabling the buyer to buy.
emlen is already being used successfully in the very early stages by fast-growing startups and innovative companies such as Candis, Mews, Orderbird, Drooms, Datango, Ftapi, Logward or Infinidat.
„Nearly 80% of today’s B2B buyers say their buying experience was too complex or difficult. We will simplify this experience with emlen for all involved parties and pursue the vision that B2B sales will become a kind of commodity“, says co-founder Marc Grewenig.
„With Millennials as the first ‚digital‘ generation increasingly moving into key decision-making positions of B2B customers, we are seeing dramatic shifts in buying behaviour similar to what happened with consumers a decade ago“, says Christian Meckelburg, Investment Manager at coparion. „As a pioneer in this emerging category, emlen empowers every B2B sales organization to achieve ‚Buyer-Led Growth‘ by putting their customers where they belong – in the driving seat.
With the raised capital, the team plans to put significant investment in the emlen technology, in order to realize the vision of buyer-centric B2B sales, as well as grow the marketing and sales team.
Source: emlen GmbH
