Growblocks lures $6 million to enact "mission control" for revenue forecasts

Is there a wrong way to forecast SaaS revenue? Copenhagen's Growblocks thinks there is.

The 2021-founded startup recently raised $6 million in seed funds for its revenue planning & execution platform, which is designed to help startups achieve revenue growth based on methodology.

Growblocks' software was designed to calculate benchmarks for SME revenue planning, quarterly reviews and performance tracking.

Its operating field is highly topical just now as SMEs face down recession concerns, through cutting sales forecasts or expenditures, or eventually making redundancies.

Growblocks CEO Toni Holbein says that for many companies growth is a function of "top-down" revenue assumptions, which may ring true in the C-suite but have less basis in front line activity.

There's several startups around Europe trying to help startups plan out revenues more easily. But Holbein says his business was able to start banking cash flow from a "paper version" of its product very early, using that as a baseline while it delivered on the full software suite.

Jonathan Becker, Headline partner, said: "Almost anyone can plan, but translating those plans into actionable steps is very hard. There is a massive demand for modern treasury management solutions.

"Among them, Growblocks is the only one that makes full use of a company’s
data sources to build scenarios of the project and hiring plans that support revenue
targets.”

Growblocks' seed round is led by venture capital firm Project A Ventures, with participation from over 20 angel investors and VC Headline, which led Growblock's pre-seed round previously. Angel backers included Saas founders Ulrik Bo Larsen (Falcon.io founder) Chris Schagen  (Contentful) and  Pieterjan Bouten (Showpad).

Project A Ventures partner Sam Cash said the lack of revenue visibility was hampering SaaS companies, with most strategic planning performed using only cost estimates.

Cash said: "Strategic planning from a cost perspective has severe limitations for SaaS companies that are implementing operating plans.

"Most of these plans are not baked against actual operating data, and silos exacerbate this problem. Growblocks is mission control for revenue professionals and is solving this issue with a number of best-in-class companies. We’re delighted to be investing and working alongside the Growblocks team.”