Announcing OnRamp’s Series A and Why We Invested
Customer onboarding, the process of guiding new clients through the initial stages of their journey with a product or service, is a crucial yet often overlooked aspect of business strategy. The onboarding experience sets the tone for the entire customer relationship, making it a critical touchpoint that, if mismanaged, can lead to dissatisfaction and churn. Despite its significant impact on customer satisfaction, retention, and long-term loyalty, many companies have failed to invest adequately in this area, even today.
There are misconceptions in the industry that customer onboarding software as a category has been solved for, but as we started digging into the problem space, and spoke to customer success/onboarding practitioners, we heard:
“We use Monday.com to track progress, it’s a hack, not great but somewhat works.”
“Email has been the core tool. Or spreadsheets if multiple teams need to be involved. It’s very manual for us.”
“Yes, there are some CS tools out there, but they don’t do the onboarding piece well. Quite the lack of focus in this arena.”
“It’s been hard for us to give visibility to our end customers on onboarding status, or report internally too to help with revenue forecasting.”
The reality is that post-sales friction is a massive problem faced by most companies. On average, it takes 100 days to onboard a new B2B customer and 120+ tasks require completion before revenue can be recognized, with 25% delay from expected time-to-revenue. After every sale is closed, different teams need to manually onboard and process new systems, often creating a difficult and frustrating customer onboarding experience as well.
The massive pain-points around onboarding across customers of all sizes are what got us excited when we met OnRamp. OnRamp is a two-sided SaaS customer onboarding platform, automating manual tasks to enable faster B2B revenue recognition. Alongside reducing onboarding time and improving onboarding experience, OnRamp allows its customers to identify specific points of friction in a data-driven manner and enables both customers and vendors to communicate with each other on action items during onboarding.
Co-founders, Paul Holder (CEO) and Ross Lerner (COO) started working on OnRamp in 2021. Paul & Ross met and worked together at VTS, a commercial leasing and asset management software platform. While leading customer onboarding and customer success teams at software companies (VTS, Troops) for several years, Paul felt friction in customer implementations that marred not only the customer experience but also limited the future growth potential of retention and upsells. The duo dug deeper into the problem space, talking to 100+ industry leaders to better understand the problems in customer enablement processes. They found that while friction exists throughout the customer life cycle, the most important step is to correctly set up customers in the beginning. And thus, they productized OnRamp to fix the onboarding process once and for all.
Prior to OnRamp, post a customer sale, onboarding explodes into a maze of new people, systems, and processes:
With OnRamp, customers can streamline workflow and direct appropriate onboarding steps to relevant parties, eliminating post-sales friction:
A friendly customer-facing front-end makes complex sales seamless and easy to manage in the onboarding context, with OnRamp’s three primary platform tenets:
i) Automation First
ii) Completely Modular
iii) Enterprise-Ready
OnRamp targets both mid-market and enterprise clients because customer onboarding needs transcend to all B2B companies. OnRamp customers include companies such as Cardinal Health, CVS, Taylor, Anheuser Busch, Kentik, and many others.
Overall, our investment thesis is based on recognition of a large market opportunity in an underserved category and the founding team’s expertise in customer success. When combined with a multi-pronged go-to-market strategy, stickiness of the product, and the potential for network effects, these attributes make OnRamp a stellar company to back.
OnRamp’s vision for the future and its impressive growth to date have attracted an outstanding group of investors. We are excited to lead the Series A and collaborate with Contour Venture Partners, Pear VC, Flybridge, Correlation Ventures, and other funds, in addition to prominent angels including Claire Hughes Johnson, corporate officer and prior COO at Stripe, Steve Fredette, co-founder at Toast, and Louis Beryl, prior Partner at YCombinator and a16z.
We are also thrilled to work closely with Paul and Ross to help them build a transformational company and establish OnRamp as a category leader in the space. For more on OnRamp, visit their website (www.onramp.us) and LinkedIn, and check out their careers page here — they are hiring!
— Tasnia Huque & Noah Doyle
