Sidharth Kakkar understands the agony of relying on a massive spreadsheet. When he establishing his previous company, Freckle Education, the main spreadsheet with all of the data that everyone utilizing would either not load or crash the machine. His company subsequently purchased, but the pain point stayed with him, so when Kakkar left; he began conducting discovery interviews to see how other organizations dealt with “spreadsheet nightmares.”
“One of my favorites was a CFO who took a company public, and during the roadshow, people would ask for all of these cohorts, and his team would go crazy putting them together just for the roadshow,” Kakkar recounted. In December 2020, he and Michelle Lee, his first bizops hire, decided to launch Subscript, a subscription intelligence firm. Subscript builds APIs for subscription-based SaaS firms that pull data from CRMs, general ledgers, and billing systems and organize it such that it is not only easy to discover, but also delivers up-to-date subscription revenue indicators.
According to Kakkar, the subscription business has been on a “crazy run” recently, but while many people like the idea of returning or recurring consumers, not everyone wants to make business decisions using subscription language. Plaid CTO Jean-Denis Greze, Pilot founder Waseem Daher, CircleCI + Dark founder Paul Biggar, Postman’s head of growth Jesse Miller. And Gusto’s head of growth Allen Wo all contributed to the $3.75 million seed round led by First Round, with participation from 40 angel investors including Plaid CTO Jean-Denis Greze, Pilot founder Waseem Daher, CircleCI + Dark founder Paul Biggar, Postman’s head of growth Jesse
Subscript produces unique data pipelines, which he refers to as a “revenue source of truth” in the company. For example, if a deal for $1 million in bookings closed in Salesforce, the system will distinguish between one-time revenue and recurring revenue. On what they are viewing, the finance person will have the final say. The user can then slice and dice the data to get the information they need to make data-driven decisions for investors, boards of directors, and leadership teams.
“You can have the major decision points that leadership teams are considering and also use it for course correction,” Kakkar said. “Sometimes you don’t know whether you’re going to hit your number, where you’re headed, or how things are going in the midst of a quarter.” Subscript currently has 21 customers, including Circle and Flipcause, and is tracking over $100 million in revenue for them, According to Kakkar, that a figure the company use internally to gauge the size of the company.
The startup is launching its beta, and the fresh cash will used to expand the team and product. Because the company is still early in its journey and is developing a difficult product, Kakkar believes that expanding the engineering and market support teams will be critical. Subscript is seeing how expansive the prospects for accommodating ideas like usage-based billing are as more organizations arrange their business models to suit the type of recurrent consumers that subscription-based businesses have. “That model is gaining a lot of traction,” Kakkar noted. “There is a great deal of complexity in the types of companies we’re getting into, but it’s hard to achieve without software.”
