Rocketlane snags $24M to bring AI-led experiences for professional services teams

SaaS startup Rocketlane, which serves professional services teams in countries including the U.S., India and Europe with its automation platform, has raised $24 million in a fresh investment. It plans to deploy AI to help enterprises better understand customer feedback.

Professional services teams at an enterprise are tasked with delivering projects to clients on time and within budget. However, for such a critical task, these teams do not get unified solutions and often juggle among multiple tools to get their work done. This delays project deliveries and makes clients anxious. Recently, a category called professional services automation (PSA) emerged to serve service teams. Nonetheless, some known PSA solutions still rely on traditional software, resulting in inaccuracy in project health reports and subpar delivery experiences.

Enter Rocketlane. The startup, headquartered in Utah and Chennai, replaces several tools that professional services teams use for client projects, including time tracking, resource management, project accounting and management, document collaboration and communication, with what it calls its all-in-one modern PSA platform.

Founded in April 2020 by second-time entrepreneurs Srikrishnan Ganesan, Vignesh Girishankar and Deepak Bala, Rocketlane initially aimed to support customer onboarding. However, it has broadened its scope and doubled down on addressing the needs of professional services teams.

The concept of Rocketlane came from the problems the co-founders faced while onboarding their customers in their previously built in-app messaging startup Freshchat, which Freshworks acquired in 2015.

"We felt the projects that professional services teams were running were causing a lot of anxiety internally and externally … And the pattern we could see is this is a moment in time when the customer experiences a partnership with the vendor. And so if it goes well, if it's a happy partnership, then the customer doubles down on that partnership," Ganesan told TechCrunch.

Rocketlane targets mid-market and lower enterprise clients with professional services teams of 150 to 2,000 members. Its customer base includes OpenGov, LivePerson, Fivetran, Personio and Icertis. The startup competes against core PSA platforms such as Kantata and project management tools like Asana and Monday.com by combining both.

The all-equity Series B funding, co-led by 8VC, Matrix Partners India and Nexus Venture Partners, will enable Rocketlane to enhance its PSA platform.

Ganesan said that the startup plans to introduce conversational AI to help professional services teams get signals from client meetings on whether customers want to continue to pay for their projects or could take a back seat. Rocketlane is also introducing AI templates for emails and documents that the services teams use. Additionally, the startup is upgrading the customer portal it offers to enterprises for their clients with a website builder-like experience to make it consistent with their brand.

Rocketlane currently has 500 paying customers globally, with 60% of its total revenue coming from the U.S. It plans expansion in the U.S. by hiring more leadership and sales positions. Further, it looks to expand into Europe by hosting a one-day event in September.

The startup has a headcount of 120 people: 15 in the U.S. and the rest in India.

To date, Rocketlane raised $45 million, with its Series A round of $18 million coming in January 2022. Ganesan said the startup's valuation grew around 2x the last round, without sharing any specifics. He also mentioned that the startup saw over 3.1x growth in revenues in 2023.