Lative announces $3M seed round led by Elkstone Ventures

Irish-based sales performance, efficiency and planning start-up Lative has raised $3 million in seed funding led by Elkstone Ventures to automate the B2B sales planning and execution process in real-time.

Lative has developed powerful and easy-to-use cloud-based sales performance, efficiency and planning software that helps B2B revenue teams monitor and improve sales performance. It allows users to understand their sales performance, cost efficiency and return on investment (ROI) with real-time risk and opportunity assessment, as well as easily simulate future capacity and investment plans with far higher accuracy than how it’s currently done within organisations today.

The software connects top-down revenue plans and targets to bottoms-up performance and costs, empowering companies to boost sales productivity, maximise every dollar spent, and plan with precision and purpose.

Lative recognises the need for combining planning with execution within sales organisations and has built the platform to solve this need. Historically, this has been a top-down approach which Lative acknowledges is an inaccurate and inefficient method and leads to expensive mistakes. Instead, the company takes the customers’ actual bottom-up data in real-time in order to build accurate capacity plans and see the impact of strategic initiatives on sales productivity and return on investment. This is not a once-off solution, but can be used consistently to monitor sales performance and efficiency as the company grows and changes.

Currently, there are a growing number of companies on the platform including EnterpriseDB, Oneflow and Saleshood. Lative will continue to improve and deepen their integrations with strategic technology partners Salesforce and Snowflake, as well as continue to expand their broader integration partner ecosystem with a range of CRMs, ERPs, Finance and HR systems. With the funding, Lative intends to invest in its go-to-market strategy and further development of the platform. This funding will also enable Lative to build an integral insights and benchmarking module which will improve decision-making by sales teams.

Lative was co-founded in 2022 by former colleagues Werner Schmidt (led revenue operations and sales enablement for high-growth SaaS businesses like Sage and Citrix), and Laura Tortosa Sancho (led multiple sales operations functions at Sage and was a senior consultant at Deloitte). Both founders have extensive revenue operations backgrounds and consistently struggled firsthand with the issues that Lative now solves.

Werner Schmidt, CEO & co-founder of Lative said, “As economic conditions have changed in recent years, for B2B sales teams sales productivity and efficiency has gone from an afterthought to a critical success factor. Lative connects revenue plans to performance and costs in real-time so that you can focus on making the right decisions or course correct at the right times to achieve your revenue and profitability goals.”

Elkstone Ventures (Flipdish, LetsGetChecked, Manna) led the funding round, with participation from Enterprise Ireland, new investor Handshake Ventures (Beautiful.ai, 1Qbit, SteamElements), and existing investors WestWave Capital, Future Five and various Scouts and Angels from Sequoia, EQT, Sage, GoTo, Contentful and others were also involved in the funding round, including Kasper Hulthin (founder of Peakon, Podio and Kost) and Vernon Bubb (Stage2 Capital, Managing Director EMEA at Clari) who are both on the board of Lative, and Warren Weiss (founder, GP at WestWave Capital).

Niall McEvoy, Partner at Elkstone Ventures said, “Lative is making sales teams more efficient, by replacing spreadsheets with software that can drastically improve sales results. The platform is potentially category-defining for sales team management. Werner and Laura are real domain experts with decades of relevant sector experience. Customers speak highly of the transformational impact of the solution ”

Jenny Melia, Executive Director at Enterprise Ireland said: “The team at Lative is operating in an exciting space – as customers target increased productivity and profitability, Lative’s innovative product offering to improve performance and efficiency in sales teams could not be more timely. Supporting Irish companies with the ambition to scale globally is a key priority for Enterprise Ireland and we look forward to continuing to work closely with the team at Lative to drive accelerated growth across international markets.”

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