{"id":27756,"date":"2023-03-29T21:53:22","date_gmt":"2023-03-29T21:53:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scienceandnerds.com\/2023\/03\/29\/orb-which-helps-b2b-companies-price-their-products-raises-19-1m\/"},"modified":"2023-03-29T21:53:24","modified_gmt":"2023-03-29T21:53:24","slug":"orb-which-helps-b2b-companies-price-their-products-raises-19-1m","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceandnerds.com\/2023\/03\/29\/orb-which-helps-b2b-companies-price-their-products-raises-19-1m\/","title":{"rendered":"Orb, which helps B2B companies price their products, raises $19.1M"},"content":{"rendered":"

Source:https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2023\/03\/29\/orb-which-helps-b2b-companies-price-their-products-raises-19-1m\/<\/a><\/br>
\nOrb, which helps B2B companies price their products, raises $19.1M<\/br>
\n2023-03-29 21:53:22<\/br><\/p>\n

\n

Alvaro Morales and Kshitij Grover were working together as engineering leaders at Asana for five years, during a time when the company underwent major changes to pricing and packaging. The initiatives were painful for both the engineering and finance departments, they say \u2014 which is when the pair realized that they wanted more flexibility over how software-as-a-service (SaaS) products were billed and monetized.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe found it counterintuitive that billing tools often constrain and dictate what teams can try out,\u201d Morales told TechCrunch in an email interview. \u201cThey should, instead, enable the flexibility to meet customers where they are.\u201d<\/p>\n

To achieve this flexibility (or at least try), Morales and Grover co-founded Orb<\/a>, a pricing platform that helps companies automate a range of different billing types \u2014 usage-based, subscriptions or a mix of both. Orb today revealed that it\u2019s raised $19.1 million across Series A ($14 million led by Menlo) and seed ($5.1 million led by Greylock) rounds to date, which Morales says is being put toward customer acquisition, go-to-market and R&D efforts.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe trend towards usage-based pricing has accelerated in recent years, and so has the hype around it. [But] there\u2019s no one-size-fits all approach to pricing,\u201d Morales, who serves as CEO, said. \u201cWe like to think of Orb as marrying an analytics product and a billing product to create a new approach that provides flexibility and enables experimentation. Orb gives companies a single source of truth that can connect every unit of product usage to revenue.\u201d<\/p>\n

To Morales\u2019 earlier point, it\u2019s true, certainly, that more SaaS companies are shifting to usage-based pricing. In a 2021 survey<\/a> from OpenView, 45% of SaaS companies said that they\u2019re using usage-based pricing, up from 34% in 2020. Twilio, Strip and Plaid are among big middleware companies charging by usage, while Shopify, Slack and HubSpot are among the major application companies that have opted for the model.<\/p>\n

Orb handles a range of billing tasks, including collecting and metering product usage data, invoicing customers and generating revenue reports. Within the platform, users can model out alternative pricing plans and orchestrate changes in real time, drawing on product usage insights to find revenue opportunities.<\/p>\n

\"Orb\"<\/p>\n

Orb\u2019s pricing engine provides tools to test new strategies and analyze usage data. Image Credits:<\/strong> Orb<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Orb can be used to schedule future price changes for customer cohorts or contract renewals. Meanwhile, on the invoicing side, it lets companies directly embed draft invoices into product billing portals \u2014 surfacing past-due invoices and attempting to recover failed payments automatically.<\/p>\n

\u201cOrb gives companies the control and flexibility to monetize with any pricing model, without the cost of building it in-house,\u201d Morales said. \u201cWe aim to have pricing move at the pace of product innovation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Orb competes with several other players in the SaaS billing automation space, like Zenskar<\/a>, which offers a platform for companies to generate bills for a variety of different pricing plans. There\u2019s also Metronome<\/a>, a startup developing billing and data infrastructure to process data at scale, and m3ter<\/a>, which focuses on usage-based customer scenarios.<\/p>\n

For its part, Orb, which publicly launched today, claims to have high-profile customers, including Airbyte, Dune and Materialize. Morales wouldn\u2019t reveal the size of Orb\u2019s customer base or any revenue figures, but \u2014 evidently anticipating growth \u2014 he said that Orb plans to double its 14-person workforce by the end of the year.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are players who have emerged as point solutions that specialize in usage-based metering, but point solutions present an operational challenge because revenue data gets fragmented across multiple systems,\u201d Morales continued. \u201cThe end users include the multiple stakeholders at each company who touch pricing and billing, with engineers, product managers, revops, and finance controllers using Orb actively to drive business decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Saam Motamedi, a general partner at Greylock who led Orb\u2019s seed round, had this to add via email: \u201cSaaS companies must drive sustainable and profitable growth and need solutions that deliver value without requiring additional seats or active usage. When combined with the AI- and machine learning-driven automation revolution, cloud economics are in a state of rapid flux. The speed with which software businesses can evolve monetization will differentiate the winners. We see Orb as a key to unlocking the value for the next major wave in software.\u201d<\/p>\n

San Francisco\u2013based Orb\u2019s other investors include base case capital, Scribble Ventures, South Park Commons, FOG Ventures, Essence VC, Data Community Fund, the Cannon Project and SV Angel, as well as individual angel backers.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

<\/br><\/br><\/br><\/p>\n

Science, Tech, Technology<\/br>
\n<\/br>
\nSource:https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2023\/03\/29\/orb-which-helps-b2b-companies-price-their-products-raises-19-1m\/<\/a><\/br><\/br><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Source:https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2023\/03\/29\/orb-which-helps-b2b-companies-price-their-products-raises-19-1m\/ Orb, which helps B2B companies price their products, raises $19.1M 2023-03-29 21:53:22 Alvaro Morales and Kshitij Grover were working together as engineering leaders at Asana for five years, during a time when the company underwent major changes to pricing and packaging. The initiatives were painful for both the engineering and finance departments, they say […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27757,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,17,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science","category-tech","category-technology"],"yoast_head":"\nOrb, which helps B2B companies price their products, raises $19.1M - Science and Nerds<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/scienceandnerds.com\/2023\/03\/29\/orb-which-helps-b2b-companies-price-their-products-raises-19-1m\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Orb, which helps B2B companies price their products, raises $19.1M - Science and Nerds\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Source:https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2023\/03\/29\/orb-which-helps-b2b-companies-price-their-products-raises-19-1m\/ Orb, which helps B2B companies price their products, raises $19.1M 2023-03-29 21:53:22 Alvaro Morales and Kshitij Grover were working together as engineering leaders at Asana for five years, during a time when the company underwent major changes to pricing and packaging. 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