RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – A software analytics startup dedicated to helping B2B companies make better data-driven decisions is now getting ready to scale after landing $4 million in funding.
On Tuesday, Research Triangle-based Klearly confirmed it had raised the funds in a round led York IE with contributions from IDEA Fund Partners, Studio VC, Front Porch Ventures, and Triangle Tweener Fund.
That brings its total raised to roughly $8 million to date.
“At this stage in our journey, we’re laser focused on optimizing for product-market-fit,” its founder and CEO Alex Krawchick told WRAL TechWire. “This fundraise is going to give us momentum to continue building our capabilities and ensuring we’re able to uniquely serve the B2B market with a solution that solves their toughest revenue optimization challenges.”
Klearly CEO and founder Alex Krawchick
Launched in 2017, Klearly uses data science and machine learning to help marketing, sales, and customer success teams collaboratively understand how they’re contributing to the business so they can work more efficiently.
“Today’s B2B buying environment is noisy,” Krawchick explained. “There are often hundreds, or even thousands, of touch points between a prospective customer and the company they’re considering. All of these touchpoints create millions of rows of disparate data that quickly become impossible to decipher to figure out what’s helping buyers along their journey.”
It’s a long-standing problem, he added, which Klearly aims to solve by aggregating the data into a real-time “revenue guidance system.” That allows teams to figure out how to achieve more impact with fewer people and less time, he said.
“You can think about Klearly as an always-on revenue sidekick for marketing, sales, and customer success teams,” he said. “We’re there to read between the lines of data and empower them to move forward with confidence on the next best actions to take.”
A personal journey
Klearly’s vision is more than 10 years in the making.
Krawchick started his career working in the data space for companies such as HireVue, SAS, and IBM. At the time, he observed that companies, both big and small, were skilled at capturing data in tools like CRMs (customer relationship manager) and marketing automation systems, but they struggled to leverage it to make revenue-generating decisions.
Determined to come up with a better solution, he enrolled in graduate school at Northwestern University to earn a degree in predictive analytics in 2013. Towards the end of his program, he said he realized it was time to start his own company to help B2B companies unlock their full potential using prescriptive analytics.
He bootstrapped the company for two years before raising $1.5 million in seed capital from IDEA Fund Partners and Service Provider Capital, according to Crunchbase. A second round followed of roughly $1.6 million in 2021.
Klearly platform
Today, Klearly has 11 employees with an office space at Frontier inside the Research Triangle Park. At present, there are no immediate plans to hire.
Instead, Krawchick said he is focused on launching of a self-service installation of its application into customer relationship manager (CRM) and marketing automation platforms (MAPs). “Ensuring we have the right roles in place to support these efforts will be critical. We’re still refining exactly what these roles will be, and when they’re going to come onboard,” he said.
Despite strong market headwinds with rising interest rates and inflation, he remains optimistic.
“We see the challenging market situation as an opportunity to help other teams figure out how to best optimize their spend and go-to-market motions on the path to more efficient and effective growth,” he said. “In five years, our goal is to be the category leader for B2B Revenue Optimization.”
