- Buyer enablement platform Tropic announced it raised $2.1 million in seed financing led by Founder Collective
Buyer enablement platform Tropic, a company that is radically simplifying the software purchasing process for businesses and vendors, announced it raised $2.1 million in seed financing led by Founder Collective.
Along with Founder Collective, Tropic also secured its financing from Company Ventures, Plaid founders Zach Perret and Will Hockey, Flatiron Health founders Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg, Adobe Creative Cloud chief product officer Scott Belsky and former Seamless CEO Jason Finger. Tropic plans to use the funding to expand its New York headquarters and scale its engineering, operations, and go-to-market teams. Founder Collective partner Micah Rosenbloom will join Tropic’s board.
Plus the company also announced the general availability of its buyer enablement platform — which is available today. This enables businesses to discover and collaborate with SaaS vendors and it simplifies the software buying process. Using Tropic, both business software buyers and sellers have a centralized platform in which they can evaluate vendor and product fit based on business needs, use cases, features, and pricing as well as directly collaborate throughout the sales process.
As the first buyer enablement platform, Tropic was designed to make the process of buying business software easy by removing obstacles at every stage from discovery to decision. And Tropic’s platform matches businesses to the best vendors based on their unique needs.
From there, buyers are able to collaborate across teams and company stakeholders, compare vendors and products, and communicate and negotiate with vendors in real-time in one place without endless back-and-forth via email. On the other side, vendors have limited visibility into how they are performing in each deal opportunity relative to competitors at every step in the sales process thus enabling them to make changes to their offering or pricing in order to increase their chances of closing the deal.
Some of the company’s early customers include Bleacher Report, The Tot, Airtime, and over 50 other brands. Tropic is rapidly expanding its base due to its ability to save time in a notoriously complex process.
Using Tropic business software buyers are able to evaluate vendors and products at zero cost. And with Tropic, buyers can discover vendors and products that meet their business’ unique needs without spending time or resources on research. Buyers are matched with vendors by independent domain experts who lend their experience and knowledge to ensure an optimal use case fit.
Plus Tropic is used for collaborating with vendors at each step of the sales process. And for the first time, buyers and vendors have a centralized collaboration platform that enables real-time communication between business teams and multiple vendors, dramatically reducing back-and-forth emails and calls. And important evaluation and sales information is securely stored for easy review.
With Tropic, users can connect and collaborate with pre-qualified buyers. And vendors are able to share product information, negotiate terms, and communicate directly with prospective buyers in real-time within a secure, centralized SaaS platform.
Users also gain valuable insight into the buyer’s unique business and user needs. With Tropic, vendors have complete transparency into a buyer’s unique needs and goals, ensuring a better product/use case fit, and dramatically reducing the time and resources wasted on pursuing the wrong customers.
The Tropic platform can be used to see why they are winning (or losing) deals and optimize their sales process. And Tropic’s industry-first platform reveals how vendors are stacking up relative to other software that buyers are evaluating thus enabling them to adapt their offering, pricing, or other terms to remain competitive during individual deals and in aggregate.
Key Quotes:
“Businesses today waste billions of dollars on software that doesn’t fit their needs, simply because they didn’t have all the information they needed to make an informed decision. Meanwhile, vendors chase businesses whose use cases will never be a good fit, frustrating countless sales teams. Tropic solves both of these. Tropic’s buyer enablement platform reverses the software sales process by putting the information and power in the hands of buyers. We provide the technology and expert insight to help businesses find the perfect software for their needs; centralize all the information they need to make a decision and collaborate with vendors in real-time; and, ultimately, make the best software choices for their business.”
-Tropic CEO and co-founder David Campbell
“Today’s tech ecosystem is crowded with sales software that helps SaaS vendors maximize sales revenue, with little concern for a buyer’s true needs. Tropic is flipping the paradigm on its head — and putting the power back in the hands of the buyer — by providing a centralized platform for them to evaluate products and own every step of the sales process. Tropic is unique because it objectively connects buyers with vendors in a way that virtually eliminates the friction associated with traditional SaaS sales outreach tactics. Tropic represents the first win/win approach for both software buyers and sellers and we’re very excited to be a part of the team’s growth.”
-Micah Rosenbloom, partner at Founder Collective
“We used Tropic to purchase a social suite solution. Their platform matched us with vendors we hadn’t heard of and made it super easy for the whole team to navigate the decision with transparency. I also loved that we could share feedback easily with vendors on the platform without writing any emails, but the best part was how easily we could communicate the decision to leadership: executives immediately understood the rationale in our decision with Tropic’s evaluation system.”
-Andrew Cooper, Director of Brand at Airtime
