Most small businesses, which form the backbone of an economy, today don’t have the resources to handle their IT needs. Take restaurants, for example. They have likely outsourced this job to contract IT professionals to reduce expenses.
Every time they need to buy a point-of-sale machine, a printer, new computers, or assign business emails to employees, they reach out to a trusted IT advisor, who then works with vendor partners to secure products and services that the business needs.
“SMBs are often so focused on helping customers that they end up strapped for time to select the right technology that suits their business needs. Increasingly, more and more IT channel partners are assuming the role of trusted advisors to these SMBs for their technology needs,” said Shruti Ghatge, co-founder and chief executive of Zomentum.
These IT advisors play an immensely crucial role in helping companies with their sale. For even giants like Microsoft, it’s the reseller partners who drive much of their sales. But these professionals are still using legacy tools.
Ghatge, who earlier worked as an investor at Accel, spotted an opportunity in this space and is tackling it with her new startup Zomentum. The U.S.-headquartered startup’s platform allows IT partners to bring their entire sales process together, a phenomenon she said is helping them increase their revenue and close more sales in less time.
On Tuesday, three-year-old Zomentum, which aims to build a strong IT partner network that can serve as an effective sales channel to promote the hyperlocal IT market, said it has raised $13 million in its Series A round (from existing investors Elevation Capital and Accel, and Greenoaks Capital). The new round, which brings Zomentum’s to-date raise to $17.1 million, also saw participation from Eight Roads Ventures.
Citing internal research, Zomentum said average IT partners on its platform are able to create documents 70% faster, close twice as many deals with a 600% increase in deal value and are seeing 2X increase in conversion.
“We see an opportunity to leverage the power of AI and data science to enable business insights for these channel partners. We want our partners and their clients to leverage AI-enabled Business Intelligence to help gain actionable insights and take smart decisions, something that until now, was available only to enterprises,” said Rahil Shah, co-founder and chief technology officer of Zomentum, in a statement.
More than 80% of Zomentum customers today are in the U.S., and Ghatge said the startup will deploy the fresh capital to expand its presence in the market and broaden its product offerings with features such as vCIO, QBR and assessments.