Chennai- and Seattle-based enterprise startup Ally has raised USD 8 million in its Series A round led by Accel Partners India, with participation from Vulcan Capital and Founders Co-op. Tiger Global Management’s former private equity chief, Lee Fixel also invested in Ally in his personal capacity.
In January this year, Fixel, along with Vulcan Capital and Founders Co-op, also invested USD 3 million in this two-year-old startup in the seed round.
With a presence in more than 70 markets across the world, Ally a goal setting and performance management startup will use the money to scale its product, engineering, sales, and marketing.
Its product is based on the objectives and key results (OKR) framework—a goal setting system—that ensures everyone in a team, especially a large one, is on the same page. Most of the companies either use spreadsheets or Google Docs, which Ally claims doesn’t work over the time.
The software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup provides tools which are not limited to Google Docs or spreadsheets. Ally claims its tools seamlessly integrate with other SaaS services such as Salesforce, Jira, Asana, Smartsheet, and Slack, to manage their daily workstream.
Talking to local media, its founder and CEO, Vetri Vellore, said, “Ally helps clients accelerate their business performance through alignment, agility, transparency and focus to match the fast-paced needs of their evolving markets.”
Ally’s clients include workplace collaboration firm Slack, telecom operator T-Mobile, home services startup Urban-Clap, and market research firm KPMG amongst others.
This round of funding will also be used to triple the team size that is currently 25 across India and the US, with the former comprising 60% of the total workforce. The company that competes with 15Five, BetterWorks, Khorus and Workboard, claimed its annual recurring revenue is doubling every quarter.
Vellore said his secret sauce to success is to understand and deliver what the market needs. “Nobody wants to use yet another tool, so Ally features deep integrations into Slack, and integration with other applications is in the works,” Vellore told Techcrunch.
Ally applications cost USD 7 per month per user for entry-level services, and offers a combo plan priced at USD 29 per month for teams with up to 10 users.
In 2007, Vellore had co-founded Chronus, a startup that built digital tools for employee development programs. During his stint there he learnt the value of OKR applications but found it difficult to track progress with traditional spreadsheets and other manual methods. This led him to build his own tool that eventually developed into Ally.