RocketLane scores $24M to build an AI layer for service delivery

Today, California-based RocketLane, a SaaS startup simplifying post-sales service delivery for enterprises, announced it has raised $24 million in a series B round of funding, led by 8VC, Matrix Partners India and Nexus Venture Partners. 

The investment takes RocketLane’s total capital raised to $45 million and will be strategically deployed towards evolving the company’s platform into a full-blown AI-powered offering. The move aligns with a global trend where SaaS vendors have integrated AI in different ways across their products to meet increasing demands from customers.

“We are building a layer of AI to complement project delivery teams and improve efficiencies. RocketLane is expanding its offering upstream and downstream to enable seamless execution and customer collaboration in every part of the customer journey,” Srikrishnan Ganesan, the co-founder and CEO of the company, told VentureBeat.

What does RocketLane have to offer?

When a company signs up a customer, it’s only half the battle won. They have to build on that deal with adequate service delivery, which demands timely implementation and ongoing collaboration with the client, keeping them in the loop and ensuring they get the best experience. 

Most teams today use a mix of different tools to execute their post-sale workflows. The approach works but the siloed nature of the tools can lead to inaccurate project health reports, delays and a general lack of execution insights — leading to a sub-par delivery experience and sometimes even churn. RocketLane, founded in 2020, solves this exact problem.

At the core, the company provides enterprises with an all-in-one service delivery platform that brings purpose-built experiences to drive visibility and accountability with clients and internal teams while helping the latter get ahead of problems and execute the playbook right every time.

“On one side, this includes project delivery-focused capabilities like project management (offered by tools like Coda and Asana), document collaboration, forms, customer satisfaction surveys, chat, meeting notes, status updates and email templates. Meanwhile, on the other side, this includes services operations-focused capabilities like time tracking, resource capacity management, rate cards, project finances and reporting,” Ganesan told VentureBeat. He said the platform has more breadth in native functionality than any other software in this space.

Now, as the next step in this work, the company will use the freshly raised funds to build an AI layer across its product, focusing on four key areas: operations, project delivery, governance and insights.

On the operations front, Ganesan said RocketLane has started rolling out AI. Currently, the technology helps teams streamline resource management, allowing users to staff a project in a single click based on the skills needed, availability and more parameters. They can even see the forecasted utilization, margins on a project, etc. in light of the business objective (whether to optimize for margins or balance the workload on the team).

“When it comes to project delivery, we are looking at bringing AI-powered automations into the project activities such as creating hand-off documents, meeting notes and follow-up emails. These documents and communication templates can carry gen AI-powered smart sections that get filled out automatically from call recordings, reducing manual effort for project managers and consultants,” Ganesan explained.

For governance, RocketLane will use AI to identify risks in projects and surface any deviations from playbooks for various kinds of meetings or activities. For instance, leadership could get automatic alerts if a key service team stakeholder doesn’t show up in back-to-back client meetings or misses out on key deliverables when collaborating with the clients. Meanwhile, to streamline insights, it will build a copilot interface where users can query in plain English and get exact data on their post-sale KPIs and patterns of execution. 

“‘Why are my project margins low in the enterprise segment? What is the median time to go live for the last quarter?’ AI will make it easy to find the answers you need vs needing pre-built dashboards and reports for information you need on the fly,” Ganesan noted.

Over 500 enterprise customers

With these new AI capabilities, RocketLane expects to make its offering more lucrative and draw more paying customers. Ganesan says the company has been going strong, with revenues growing over 3x annually over the past 2 years and over 12x since the last funding round in January 2022. 

Currently, RocketLane counts more than 500 enterprises as its customers. This includes some major service/implementation-heavy technology players like Live Person, Icertis, Uniphore, Moveworks, Fivetran, Salesloft and Zenoti. Flatfile, which offers smart APIs for file-based data import, was able to tap RocketLane’s to cut down the customer go-live time by 70%.

“Our customers are more involved than ever. RocketLane’s customer portal gives them real-time visibility into the status of their onboarding project. They can complete tasks on time because they know exactly what they need to do and also hit us up instantly via built-in chat to communicate more effectively,” Becca Weiss, senior director of CS and implementations at the company said in a statement.

Beyond AI capabilities, RocketLane will use the funding to hire talent across departments and double down on its community-first efforts through events and content. It will also launch a dynamic client-centric portal in the coming months, Ganesan said.