Demostack raises $34M in a Series B fundraising round headed by Tiger Global Management, including Bessemer Venture Partners, Amiti Ventures, GTMfund, Operator Collective, and StepStone for a “demo experience” platform for software-as-a-service (SaaS) sales teams.
According to CEO Jonathan Friedman, the funds will be used to extend the company’s reach while investing in R&D, sales, and marketing across the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
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The average employee utilizes at least eight SaaS apps each month and pays $2,884 in fees, making it increasingly difficult to compete for enterprise IT funds. Demos are one of the most powerful tools in a sales team’s arsenal for generating an excellent first impression. According to a survey performed by Matrix Partners managing partner David Skok, demo closing rates for most business-to-business SaaS enterprises range between 20% to 50%, higher than the typical close rate range in the software industry (about 26 per cent to 30 per cent).
Friedman co-founded Demostack in 2020 with Aaron Hakim and Gilad Avidan. Friedman is a co-founder of Reactful, a company that employs machine learning to determine website visitor behaviour and intent. He previously spent two years as the head of the product strategy at TripActions. Avidan served as a principal researcher at Cellebrite, which purportedly collaborated with the FBI to unlock the San Bernardino iPhone before co-founding online newsletter business Smore. Hakim was also a co-founder of Reactful, while Avidan was a principal researcher at Cellebrite, which purportedly collaborated with the FBI to unlock the San Bernardino iPhone.
Friedman says he came up with the idea for Demostack while working at TripActions, where he was in charge of their Liquid Expense Management program. While the Liquid R&D team was working on the live product, he discovered that sales needed a demo version of the product.
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Demostack’s proposal isn’t unique. Reprise is a similar service that allows software companies to do product tours and demos. For example, Walnut offers a platform that helps sales teams to create customised demos that highlight certain application features. Demostack, on the other hand, according to Friedman, accomplishes it better.
Customers may use a tool to clone their product into a demo environment and change elements of the demo with a drag-and-drop editor that does not need coding. (Because demo assets are developed with a single source of truth, they may be updated with each new product release.) The demo can be customised to a buyer’s use case or vertical and delivered online, through a live demo, or as a “leave-behind” after a sales call.