Customer success platform Totango raises $8M

The company's customers include Jobvite, Pandora, Zoom and Autodesk

Totango is a customer success platform company, built on the premise that, as Guy Nirpaz, the company's CEO, told me, "In a subscription economy, business are successful if they are able to retain their customers for long periods of time."

The company has now an additional $8 million to help make that happen. The Series C funding round was led by Benhamou Global Ventures, with participation from returning investors Pitango Venture Capital, Canvas Ventures, and Interwest Partners. 

This round brings the company's total venture funding to $32 million. 

Founded in 2010, the San Mateo, California-based Totango has a platform that allows its clients to manage complex customer relationships across different account levels, multiple products, and channel partners.

They can also use it to understand the health of their entire customer portfolio, and to save time and resources with automated programs, customer segmentation, and revenue forecasts. Features include early warning systems, customer segmentation, customer success campaigns and success plays.

Totango currently "processes billions of customer signals and finally makes meaning of it all for customer-facing teams," Nirpaz said. 

"This allows companies to know, in real-time, which customers need their attention, why, and what they should be doing about this. Totango’s platform gives teams the tools necessary to identify top priorities, manage and segment their customer portfolios based on health, proactively engage customers at scale, and drive value along their customer journey. This helps companies improve retention rates and grow recurring revenue."

The typical customer for Totango are companies that sell products and services by subscription, specifically their Customer Success and Account Management teams who are "dedicated to proactively ensuring customer retention, adoption, expansion and value." 

Included among its 300 customers are Autodesk, Act-On, Jobvite, Zoom, Infosys, Clarabridge, and Pandora.

Totango clients are able to reduce customer churn numbers anywhere between 10 percent to 20 percent, improve on customer growth in rates of over 30 percent, and improve team focus and productivity by over 35 percent.

The company is currently the only customer success technology vendor to have an enterprise solution that allows companies to manage complex customer relationships across different account levels, multiple products, and channel partners, Nirpaz told me.

"Totango was built from the ground up as a data technology solution to simplify the complexities of customer success. We believe that companies that connect the dots of all their customer data and actively monitor for meaningful customer health changes will be able to proactively engage with their customers, make a positive impact, and win in their respective markets," he said.

"Totango’s independent platform enables them to do all this. It includes functionality that improves customer success team productivity, such as sending one-to-many engagements and automated workflows based on customers’ triggered behavior using the product or service."

The company will use the funding it has raised to scale its Enterprise Sales, Marketing and Product Development organizations, while also adding 30 new employees over the next 12 months.

In addition to the funding, it was also announced that Eric Benhamou, founder and general partner at BGV, will join Totango’s board as chairman.

"Eric has 40 years of experience in the software and technology space and has served on more than 25 corporate boards, including Palm, Netscape, Legato, and 3Com, where he also served as CEO for several years. He has a strong affiliation with enterprises and BGV’s LPs are veteran executives managing experienced enterprise operations," Nirpaz said.

"He will guide Totango on executing our business strategy to take Customer Success to enterprise tech organizations. He plans to work closely with the executive team and offer hands-on support in our operations."