Lightspeed’s investment in Rattle
By: Hemant Mohapatra
Tags: Startup, Sales, Slack, Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

Lightspeed’s investment in Rattle

Sales and marketing tech are some of the toughest venture-investable categories. While they have birthed several SaaS behemoths — Salesforce and Hubspot being the flag bearers of sales and marketing respectively — the category is littered with 100s of small players that taper off at $5–10M ARR and then eventually get acquired by one of the market leaders. Like many investors, for years I had been apprehensive of investing into this space. But all that changed when I met Rattle a few months ago.

Right off the bat, we loved the Rattle team. The founders — Sahil Aggarwal, Apoorva Verma, and Milan Singh — were as tight-knit and balanced as they come and were building a high-quality and strongly opinionated product basis first-hand personal experience. They had raked up very strong ARR growth in just a few months and their customer logo-set was already the who’s who of venture-backed startups in the US.

Still, I was skeptical.

Thankfully, my colleague Shreyans Chopra wasn’t. He encouraged me to speak to some of Rattle’s customers, and boy am I glad we did! Every single customer we spoke to exhibited a level of NPS I’ve rarely heard before. Not only were they championing Rattle internally within their teams, they were championing Rattle to us! Several customers talked about how Rattle had become a “verb” within their orgs. Instead of putting together complicated process flows in docs or emails, people were just asking “can you Rattle it?” over slack. After a few such calls, we were so sold (pun intended) that we dropped everything and hustled hard to win over the team!

What we heard from Rattle users

So what exactly is Rattle?

In the last two decades, enterprise business processes have undergone two massive automation waves. The first wave gave us monolithic, centralized systems of record such as Salesforce and Workday. They weren’t pretty or easy to use, but they served an important purpose — digitizing and centralizing the previously analog and siloed business processes. The second wave focused on systems of intelligence overlays such as Looker and Gong. They sat atop the business systems of record and then predicted the future state of the business. We are now amidst a third shift: one towards systems of engagement such as Slack and Teams. These engagement platforms are the new nerve centers for work, but they are siloed from record-keeping and intelligence platforms, making collaboration and decision-making cumbersome. Rattle bridges the gap.

Rattle is a no-code automation platform for a variety of business processes, starting with sales & marketing.

As the S&M tech stack gets more complex, both data (e.g. call logs, deal statuses) and CTAs (e.g. follow-up reminders) are getting siloed into platforms such as Salesforce, Gong, Outreach, and many more. Rattle integrates with all these systems of record and systems of intelligence to (1) surface information timely via Slack (and others e.g. MSFT Teams in future), and (2) allow updating these platforms from inside of Slack which customers love as it reduces a lot of friction and time taken to update these records piecemeal.

The Sales & Marketing automation category is crowded. However, Rattle is unique in that it doesn’t force the learning curve of a new platform; it instead integrates with Slack & Salesforce in < 30mins and becomes useful “the same day” as per customers. Rattle’s early champion is the emerging S&M Ops team in fast-growing startups ($20–100M capital raised; $5–30M ARR) with 50–200 member sales/marketing teams.

Here’s our investment thesis behind Rattle:

Large automation TAM: Gartner estimates the global spending on RPA (simple if-this-then-that automation) alone to reach $2.4B in 2022 (pre-covid estimates), growing at a 37% CAGR. Automation is growing in importance with over 85% of large and very large organizations having deployed some form of RPA by 2022 representing a total of $13–15B TAM upside if you crack complex forms of automation across mid-market and Fortune-2000. Slack as the new System of Record: as older systems of records get out of date, modern, real-time communication platforms such Slack, Discord, Teams are becoming the new systems of records for documentation, CTAs, & coordination. Low/No-code wave: Rattle has built a very robust self-serve product which doesn’t require engineering resources to implement and maintain the automation, and since it aligns with the existing sales user flows using Slack/Teams as a center of sales chatter, it requires zero change management. BizOps focus: Rattle targets the emerging “Ops” functions within orgs — a role that is an important decision-maker on the complex technology stacks serving sales, marketing and other functions. The strong feedback from SalesOps leaders who are fast becoming internal champions for Rattle is evidence of Rattle’s ability to serve this opportunity.

One of many use-cases solved by Rattle: Sales Productivity

Businesses worldwide are mired in processes — from sales to marketing, HR, IT, and more. With increased digitization and remote work, processes and adherence thereof are only going to diverge over time. The Rattle team really impressed us by their unrelenting focus on the most important piece of this puzzle: the people caught in these processes. Rarely have we seen such intense customer love so early in a company’s life and we at Lightspeed are really honored to lead their seed round. Go get on their waitlist here!