A young Parisian startup founded in 2020, Qobra once again confirms the predominantly B2B coloring of French software publishers. The startup with more than 100 corporate clients – including Doctolib, Payfit and SeLoger – also confirms that it knows how to raise funds.
In March 2022, it raised 5 million euros in seed funding. A little over a year later, Qobra is carrying out a new round of financing. In series A, the publisher collects 10 million euros from European VCs Singular and Breega.
Integration with existing applications and data sources
In a press release, the provider of a SaaS solution for managing variable income specifies that the financial operation was led by Singular, with the participation of the English from Revenue Syndicate and its historic investor Breega.
To convince investors and customers, Qobra can put forward several figures and arguments. First of all, a number: 2000 to 3000 billion dollars. This corresponds to the global annual amount dedicated to the variable remuneration of salespeople.
This figure is therefore also the potential market for the French startup. His observation is in fact that this amount is “rarely controlled”. When it comes to commission management, Excel files and manual entries die hard.
This lack of industrialization in the treatment of variable remuneration translates into a cost, including in terms of trust – and ultimately motivation – within sales teams. So much for the observation.
Streamline information and ensure trust
The answer to this problem is therefore a SaaS mode solution – a classic among the business software offerings – dedicated to the management of variable remuneration. Its designer’s promise: to streamline information across the entire payment chain.
As a result, Qobra also ensures that it participates in “aligning all the company’s stakeholders: Management, financial decision-makers, sales teams and human resources.” To make it easier to use the tool, it works in no code mode.
In terms of integration into the application landscape, the publisher highlights its compatibility with the majority of CRM, ERP and HR software on the market. The advantage is data collected at the source and in real time, “making the calculation of commissions more reliable and thus limiting the margin of error.”
Automation of commission calculations for operations and finance, visibility of performance and commission budget for managers, real-time monitoring for salespeople… The startup aligns several professions around the same data.
Objective London then the United States
The startup wants to continue aligning, but this time customer references. This is the purpose of its fundraising, which aims to finance the development of new functionalities, to strengthen its customer acquisition strategy and to fuel its international establishment.
“We are seeing strong attraction from clients in different verticals, such as advertising agencies, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, real estate, financial services, insurance brokers, automobiles…” comments CEO , Antoine Fort.
And these customers are located in particular across the Channel. Internationalization will thus result in the opening of a London office at the beginning of 2024, which is intended to be an access gateway to the United States. With the ambition of becoming a European leader, Qobra plans to double its workforce, from 30 to 60 employees in 2024.