Today, we are excited to announce our investment in Calixa, the customer operations platform for the modern software business. Both in and outside the KP portfolio, we have observed a dramatic shift towards the bottoms-up, inbound GTM model. In fact, many of the fastest-growing software companies we work with are fueled by this approach. However, the universe of available GTM tooling was built for the more traditional, outbound sales model. This leaves today’s customer-facing teams to get creative with workaround solutions — writing SQL queries or switching between browser tabs to get the context they need to take action. The inefficiency this leads to has motivated many teams to build internal tools that bring the context they need to operate more effectively together. These tools rarely get the attention they need, and provide a sub-optimal solution to the original problem as a result.
Having seen this exact pattern play out across a number of the companies we work with, it was easy to get excited about the vision for Calixa aftering hearing the pitch from its founders — Thomas Schiavone and Fred Sadaghiani. Having worked together at Sift, they experienced this problem first-hand and knew there had to be a better way. We believe that better way is Calixa. Calixa connects to all of a company’s existing apps, including Stripe, Zendesk, Twilio, and Snowflake, and provides an interface for customer-facing teams to gain a unified view of the customer, and take action. By enabling this with zero engineering resources or code required, even the smallest companies can use Calixa to become more data-driven in their customer operations. As the “CRM” continues to be unbundled, we believe Calixa is poised to play an important role in providing the system of action to the modern, data-driven software business. If you are interested in learning more about Calixa, sign-up for free and try it here.
ー Bucky