Pace raises $5M to integrate product-led growth with enterprise sales

Founded by former MongoDB revenue and product leaders, Pace streamlines the transformation from traditional enterprise sales motions to a hybrid, product-led approach.

NEW YORK, Aug. 24, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Pace, a startup building a product-led revenue platform, has raised a $5M Seed investment led by Work-Bench. Pace simplifies the transformation from traditional enterprise sales motions to a hybrid, product-led approach by enabling revenue-generating teams at B2B SaaS companies to identify the users with the highest likelihood to buy while staying ahead of potential churn risks. This allows teams to take advantage of the scale and efficiency of product-led growth while continuing to deliver proven, high-impact enterprise sales strategies to the most valuable customers.

"Introducing product-led growth into an existing sales-led go-to-market motion is anything but straightforward," said Justin Dignelli, CEO and Co-Founder of Pace. "Competing priorities, fragmented data, and lack of visibility into the customer journey are major obstacles. We're already seeing how Pace can change that."

Pace combines commercial information from the CRM with usage data from the product to equip customer-facing teams with timely insights about customer behavior. Today, many companies struggle with disjointed, outdated, or siloed customer data. In a recent Gartner survey, 58% of sales leaders identified data complexity as a major roadblock. Pace provides a unified view of the customer so teams can spend time growing revenue, not combing through dashboards.

Pace was co-founded by Justin Dignelli and Rez Khan, who bring deep domain expertise as former revenue and product leaders at MongoDB. There they launched and grew MongoDB Atlas to comprise 50% of MongoDB's overall revenue and facilitated the introduction of product-led growth to the company. However, this transition was not always straightforward as data silos and lack of visibility into the customer journey hampered revenue-generating teams.

"Combining proven enterprise sales strategies with product-led growth is a real challenge that only a handful of companies have done at scale," said John McMahon, 5-time public company CRO, author of The Qualified Sales Leader, and board member of Snowflake and MongoDB, "Pace's founding team has navigated this challenge first-hand at MongoDB. Their combined experience makes them the ideal team to build software infrastructure to enable more companies as they adopt a hybrid go-to-market motion."

The funding round was supported by Alley Corp and numerous enterprise revenue leaders including John McMahon; Adam Gross, Former CEO of Heroku; Jeanne Dewitt Grosser, Head of Revenue and Growth at Stripe; Julia Prause, VP of Customer Success at Firstbase; Evan Peters, Former VP of Growth at Datadog; Ryan Precious, VP of Sales at Rockset; Jason Lynn, Co-Founder of mParticle; Jay Simons, Former President of Atlassian; and Scott Roberts, VP of Business Development at LinkedIn.

"High growth companies with PLG motions must decide whether to invest significant resources into building internal tooling or let their revenue-generating teams go without critical visibility into customer behavior," said Jessica Lin, Co-Founder and General Partner of Work-Bench. "We're excited to support Pace as they make modern go-to-market infrastructure available to companies of all sizes."

Pace is already seeing traction with design partners ranging from Fortune 500 companies to high-growth startups. With this round of funding, the Pace team will continue to invest in engineering and product development while building and expanding go-to-market functions.

Pace helps revenue-generating teams at product-led SaaS companies spend their time on the users and customers who need it most. Using commercial information from the CRM and usage data from the product, Pace equips sellers with timely insights so they can spend time growing revenue, not combing through dashboards. Learn more about Pace at paceapp.com and follow Pace on Twitter and LinkedIn.

SOURCE Pace