Announcing Ripe and our $2M pre-seed round

tl;dr – We’re excited to announce that we’ve raised a $2M pre-seed round to power the product-led economy. Ripe makes it easy for companies to respond immediately to their best customers, in-product, by coupling together key data sources and turn data into revenue.

Today, we’re thrilled to share that we’ve raised a $2M pre-seed round led by Earlybird Venture Capital, to fuel product-led growth and realise our mission of enabling SaaS teams to turn product data into actions that drive revenue.

Building for the product-led growth economy

In the past, B2B software sales was a top-down exercise. People bought software over steak dinners and PowerPoints, without really knowing what they were buying or if their colleagues would even use it. Today, the buying power has shifted from C-suite executives to the actual users. Buyers want to start using products and services for free and see real value before considering a purchase.

Combining this self-serve approach with a real sales team that approaches the best opportunities has proven to be an extremely powerful combo.

At Ripe, we believe that product-led sales is how the next generation of breakthrough companies will build out their GTM motion. We’re now on a mission to turn product data into actions that drive revenue for SaaS teams.

Think of your favourite software products. Slack, Figma, Dropbox, Zoom, Hubspot. Even enterprise software like Datadog or Snowflake are all perfect examples of companies successfully deploying these bottom-up, end-user focused motions. Customers love PLG software, and the companies who embrace it are growing the fastest. But the sales stack is oftentimes detached from product data, and teams lack tools to take advantage of the goldmine of potential revenue they are sitting on.

Why Ripe

People always ask us how we ended up building Ripe. When I met Jonatan six years ago, Jonatan was building SaaS products at Meltwater and I was finalizing my studies in engineering and computer science. Having started our careers in tech and product organizations, we've always had user data at our fingertips. But for our friends and colleagues in sales, that was never the case. It was so strange to see how hard it was for the best salespeople we knew to leverage product data in their day to day, despite the obvious value. The current sales stack is still based on fixed business or demographics data rather than ever-changing user data. There was a huge discrepancy, and it was clear that something was missing. That's why we started Ripe.

Eight months ago, we launched Ripe to help teams connect with their most valuable accounts. Today, teams ranging from founders looking for their first opportunity to scale-up revenue orgs are using Ripe to reveal, engage and act on top sales opportunities. The feedback has been terrific so far, and we’re super excited about taking this to the next level.

Backing the vision

Our pre-seed round was led by Earlybird Venture Capital, joined by Alliance Venture and a number of phenomenal angels, investors and revenue leaders in SaaS. We’re thrilled to bring on sales execs from B2B SaaS heavy-weights to our list of investors: Sara Brooks, VP Sales at Pleo and Christian Finstad, VP Sales at Mentimeter and Andreas Helbig from Atomico have joined Johannes Schildt, Founder & CEO at Kry/Livi, Fredrik Nylander, CTO Kry/Livi, Per Emanuelsson, Founder of Soundtrap and Minoo Zarbafi from SVP Bertelsmann Investments who were our earliest backers. We’re also excited to welcome Paul Klemm, Partner at Earlybird, to our board.

“The way that enterprise software is being purchased has shifted, attributing most of the buying power to the end-user. Yet, there is no infrastructure allowing sellers and buyers to instantly connect with each other. Entering into this relationship at the right time and manner represents a huge opportunity.”
- Paul Klemm, Partner at Earlybird Venture Capital

I'm incredibly proud of our team and what we have done up until today. As we celebrate this milestone, we want to give a special thanks to all of our early customers and backers who have taken an early bet on us, given us feedback, challenged and inspired us.

This round of funding will help us accelerate our product development, grow our team and bring more customers onboard. We are just getting started! If the future of PLG resonates with you and you enjoy building world-class products – please reach out at hi@getripe.com. We’d love to have you join us.

Thanks for following along, let’s go 🚀

/Elin Lütz
CEO & Founder

For more information:
✉️ elin@getripe.com
🔗 Press Kit
👩‍🚀 Open positions