Mathew Cagney (Renewtrak)
Australian automated renewals start-up Renewtrak is planning to expand overseas after securing a $3 million seed funding round from venture capital firm Tidal Ventures.
Renewtrak's platform manages the renewal process from end-to-end, ingesting and consolidating customer data, to automate renewals from quote to payment across the entire value chain — spanning hardware and software assets.
This enables vendors, distributors and channel partners to take control of customers' renewal experience and associated revenue streams by quoting and converting more renewal opportunities, reducing the time and expense involved in the process.
Renewtrak was founded in Sydney in 2014 and is led by former Afterpay executive Mathew Cagney as CEO.
The leadership team also features chief product officer, Alex Wood; CTO Andrew Duckworth and Paul Dunn as chief customer officer.
"Technology vendors lose up to 50 per cent of their opportunities at contract anniversary because the customer is not even aware the relevant product or service is due for renewal or upgrade,” Cagney said.
“We saw a real problem with vendors being able to connect through their channel to their customers to renew contracts. Our platform digitises the renewals process to make sure the customer is notified prior to the contract expiry, providing every opportunity to digitally renew and accept those terms.
“We let them know if their hardware or software asset is coming up for expiry and if they would like to extend that or buy something else."
Cagney said the platform connects the vendor, distie, channel partner and customer on a single digital ecosystem.
“It automates the whole process with their margin built-in and gives them the opportunity to keep on top of renewals,” he said.
The $3 million funding will be used to increase headcount and accelerate Renewtrak's geographic expansion. The business is already operating in more than 40 countries with partnerships including Lenovo, VMware and HP.
At the moment, Cagney said most of Renewtrak's business comes from North America and the UK, and it is seeking to add product, engineering and sales personnel.
“We’ve got a strong appetite from vendors in North America and Europe and smaller rapid high growth vendors such as graph database management system Neo4J,” he said.
“We want to double down on on-boarding more vendors in our pipeline and we are seeing a growing appetite from distributors wanting to embrace our platform for other vendors as well."
Lenovo services director Glen Edington said customer buying behaviour and preferences were evolving.
“Renewtrak is helping us to solve our renewal opportunity, allowing our customers to manage renewals frictionlessly and in their own time,” he said.
Tidal Ventures managing partner Grant McCarthy added Renewtrak is addressing a massive and rapidly growing market, as organisations continually spend more on technology and as technology businesses move their customers towards a recurring revenue model.
"By connecting vendors, distributors and customers, and demonstrating value to each, Renewtrak's platform can earn the right to roll out across additional products, geographies and channel relationships,” he said.
“We see the potential for powerful network effects throughout the technology industry globally.”
Tidal’s investment portfolio includes a range of startups including e-commerce API business Carted, customer onboarding and fraud platform FrankieOne, logistics orchestration platform Shippit, cloud call-centre solution Operata and personal safety monitoring and response company Sonder.
