Orb is a rapidly growing modern pricing platform purpose-built for flexible models. To learn more about the company, Pulse 2.0 interviewed Orb co-founder and CEO Alvaro Morales.
Alvaro Morales’ Background
Before starting Orb, Morales was an engineering leader at Asana for about 5 years through its major growth phase and direct listing.
“I led the growth engineering team and managed a couple of core product teams. I was born and raised in Lima, Peru, and have been living in San Francisco for seven years,” said Morales.
Formation of Orb
How did the idea for Orb come together? “Orb was co-founded by me (CEO), and Kshitij Grover (CTO) in 2021. We worked together as engineering leaders at Asana for 5 years, during a time when the company underwent major changes to pricing and packaging,” Morales replied. “While incredibly successful for customers and business growth, those initiatives were massively painful for both engineering and finance.”
And even with just a subscription-only SaaS model, Orb was looking to build complete flexibility and full control over how products were billed and monetized to meet the enormous challenge of driving revenue growth at scale. The team found it counterintuitive that billing tools often constrain and dictate what teams can try out. They should enable the flexibility to meet customers where they are instead. Orb is aiming to have pricing move at the pace of product innovation.
Even though pricing and packaging can seem like back office analysis far removed from product innovation, it is actually a crucial point of customer trust and leverage especially in a tightening market with revenue efficiency on every company’s mind. Spanning just about every team – ranging from product and engineering to customer success and finance, and revenue infrastructure – is not just about collecting money efficiently, it helps build better relationships with customers.
“Our idea was to bring more of a developer platform lens to the space of billing—applying the essence of flexibility, extensibility, and experimentation to the core problem of revenue,” Morales added.
Challenges Faced In Building The Company
What are some of the challenges Morales and the team faced in building the company? “When it comes to a company’s monetization strategy — whether that’s Snowflake, Twilio, New Relic, or Zapier — the details of how they price are very different from company to company. So much of the uniqueness of their products translates to custom pricing,” Morales explained. “When starting Orb, we thought long and hard about how our product could span use cases as different and varied as those, all in a single offering, without needing bespoke customizations. Our core insight in building Orb was to lean on developer-enabled extensibility. We’ve architected Orb to come out of the box with a lot of the pricing and billing levers that companies need, but also to be extensible to accommodate more nuanced use cases. This unlocks a degree of flexibility that greatly benefits our customers and empowers them to evolve their pricing over time.”
Core Products
What are Orb’s core products? Orb’s modern pricing platform was purpose-built for flexible pricing models — usage-based, subscriptions, or a mix of both.
“We help companies automate billing and enable pricing strategy experimentation, essential in this macro climate of rapid change and high focus on revenue efficiency,” Morales pointed out. “Orb powers the end-to-end revenue workflow, from collecting and metering product usage data to billing over complex pricing models to invoicing customers with detailed visibility to generating revenue reports.”
Morales noted that they like to think of Orb as marrying an analytics product and a billing product to create a new approach that provides flexibility and enables experimentation. And legacy billing providers like Zuora or Stripe Billing (built for the subscription pricing model) were not architected to handle the data volume and pricing flexibility required for hybrid pricing; they require a ton of engineering time to accurately track usage and batch report it to billing.
The new approach saves engineering time. But more importantly, Orb is able to give companies a single source of truth that can connect every unit of product usage to revenue. Plus this approach unlocks the ability to iterate pricing strategy, which lets companies try out different value metrics or billing models so Orb can power critical workflows like revenue recognition.
Evolution Of Orb’s Technology
How has Orb’s technology evolved since launching? As the company has deepened its partnership with customers, it expanded the offering to cover more of the critical financial workflows such as revenue recognition and reporting. And Orb’s revenue ledger uniquely enables the finance team to be able to tie together every unit of product usage to revenue recognized in the business.
Most Significant Milestones
What have been some of Orb’s most significant milestones? Morales revealed that they recently unveiled Orb and paired with the recent announcement, the platform features a fully functional sandbox on its website where anyone can explore how to set up their pricing and see the power of Orb’s interactive invoices.
Customer Success Stories
Orb powers billing for high-growth B2B technology companies such as Airbyte, Dune, and Materialize, saving them engineering costs and enabling them to unlock more revenue. And revenue is the goal toward which companies are building and is a company-wide effort, so Orb’s solution is designed to accelerate all stakeholders toward their goals. Orb’s pricing platform delivers:
1.) Flexibility to allow engineers and product managers to ship products faster without billing getting in the way.
2.) Real-time actionable insights to help sales and customer success teams identify upsell opportunities and build stronger relationships with customers.
3.) Accuracy and automation that reduce chances for manual billing errors and provide finance teams with detailed revenue reporting.
Funding
Orb recently closed $14 million in Series A funding. And the funding round was led by Menlo Ventures, following a seed round in 2021 of $5.1 million led by Greylock. This brought the total raised to $19.1 million.
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates Orb from its competition? “Orb is known as the only platform that spans the end-to-end revenue workflow, ranging from robust metering capabilities to flexible pricing and packaging iteration to streamlined invoicing, to reporting and revenue recognition,” answered Morales. “First and foremost, Orb gives companies the control and flexibility to monetize with any pricing model, without the cost of building it in-house. It merges the API-first nature of Stripe Billing, which is developer-friendly but inflexible and not preferred by finance teams, and Zuora, which is powerful for finance but an engineering headache and a slog to integrate. There are startups who have emerged as point solutions that specialize in usage-based metering — but point solutions present an operational challenge because revenue data gets fragmented across multiple systems.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of Orb’s future company goals? “With this latest round of funding, we’ll grow our go-to-market and R&D teams, expand the product offering, and work to fulfill our mission of providing every business with the infrastructure they need to unlock their revenue,” Morales concluded. “Revenue infrastructure is one of those gnarly, unglamorous but mission-critical problems at the heart of business. What we’re working on doesn’t come with a splash. It doesn’t. If we do our jobs right, it’s our customers’ success that will shine the most. We’re not here to make a splash; we’re here to exercise the superpower of software against this point of leverage so that companies of the next 10+ years can be effective at what they do best.”
