Enable, a startup selling access to a platform that helps business-to-business (B2B) companies manage their rebate programs, today announced that it raised $94 million in an oversubscribed Series C round led by Insight Partners with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, SE Ventures, PSP Growth and HarbourVest Partners. Bringing Enable’s total capital raised to $156 million, the proceeds will be put toward increasing headcount and expanding to new markets, particularly Europe, CEO Andrew Butt told TechCrunch in an interview.
Rebates are a familiar concept in the consumer space, but they tend to work a little differently in B2B. B2B companies offer rebates when their customers achieve some benchmark, such as total spend, purchasing a collection of products or a marketing referral. The challenge becomes keeping track of these benchmarks and progress toward them, ensuring customers receive the rebates to which they’re entitled and — in the process — fostering relationships.
Enable, which Butt co-founded in 2016 with Denys Shortt, aims to remove some of the burden of rebates and ideally turn them into profit drivers. The platform surfaces deal term and sales incentive data for manufacturers, distributors and retailers, providing insights into what’s owed versus collected, the status of rebate deals and what’s on deck.
Butt says he was inspired to launch the company by his experiences in the B2B space, including at Enable Informatix, a property management software-as-a-service vendor he co-founded and sold to Sovereign Capital in 2010. “For many organizations, rebate and incentive data is typically tucked away in massive spreadsheets where one formula error will break everything,” Butt said. “Often, this data is the responsibility of a single employee, meaning few people understand the data and how these deals work.”
In contrast, Enable provides collaborative dashboards to author, execute and track the progress of rebate deals. The platform, which allows customers to create joint business plans, also forecasts rebate activity, attempting to guarantee companies that they’ll be able to pay and collect on all rebates owed.
Enable recently launched a special pricing agreements product that connects to a company’s supply chain to improve transparency on claimbacks, the agreements between distributors and manufacturers based on sales to a contractor. Elsewhere, Enable introduced new services to manage a wider range of incentives, including a module that allows sales and pricing teams to align around large deals and a commissions system that delivers rebate status tracking to manufacturers.
“Enable helps companies incentivize the purchasing behavior of partners while also ensuring they collect all incentives owed to them,” Butt said. “Our biggest competition is Microsoft Excel spreadsheets or overextended enterprise resource management platforms.”
Butt claims that around 10,000 companies are using Enable’s platform today and that growth has been “accelerating” year-over-year after expanding to the U.S. and Canada (although he didn’t define “growth”). Enable employs 400 people, and the company expects to end the year with 435 throughout the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia.
“We’ve been extremely successful with our growth in this market, and [the Series C] round adds fuel to that growth. At the same time, it helps us extend our vision,” Butt said. “Rebates are incentives. They are a key way to drive behavior between partners. It’s our vision to empower thriving partner ecosystems, so as we continue our growth you’ll see us adding products that enhance partners alignment on goals and incentives while increasing transparency and easing friction, allowing every partner to flourish.”
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