Some of Atlanta's most successful software entrepreneurs are supporting Saleo, a startup that helps sales engineers organize their data and customize templates for software demos.
Atlanta's Tech Square Ventures, Salesloft CEO Kyle Porter, Salesloft co-founder Rob Forman, BetterCloud Executive Chairman Jon Hallett and Terminus CEO Tim Kopp participated in Saleo's $1.5 million pre-seed round.
Funding from the round will be used to advance product development, advance its product roadmap, investing in its go-to-market strategy and hiring.
The concept for Saleo was sparked from founder Justin McDonald’s career in business operations and marketing. In every company that he worked with or for, employees struggled to create a pristine and well-organized software demonstration that could help win customers and beat competitors.
After six years of working for risk-management startup Compliance 360, McDonald created his own marketing technology startup meant to help companies win deals called RambleChat. He then went on to work in executive positions at Terminus after his company was acquired in 2020.
Terminus was McDonald's first customer for Saleo.
Having a connection to Salesloft and Terminus, which are focused on sales technology and marketing technology, allowed Saleo to understand how big a problem demo preparation is, how it needs to be tackled and how to craft the right solution, McDonald said.
Creating a software demo presentation often comes with days of preparation. Missing key data and difficulty sustaining the demo can create an unorganized and bland presentation that can make companies lose out on big deals, thus losing revenue.
Over the past year, solutions for software companies' demo environments have become a new category. Now, companies are trying to make innovative solutions after seeing how large the issue is, McDonald said.
“We’re the only technology that allows software companies to manipulate and customize their live demo environments,” McDonald said. “Other players breaking in are taking screenshots of existing applications and making changes to them.”
On Saleo’s platform, companies connect to the software-as-a-service technology and upload and organize their data. The platform then gives the team control over customization for graphs, metrics, tables, text, images and icons.
All of Saleo’s current customers are business-to-business Saas companies, said McDonald. The company aims to have up to 40 customers by the end of the year.
The company currently consists of four full-time staff members including its chief product officer, head of software development. By the end of the year, the company looks to have a full-time staff of 12 employees with hires in engineering, sales and customer service.
The company will be seeking seed funding as soon as six months, said McDonald. It will also look to augment its platform by leveraging AI machine learning to perform graph modeling.
In the short-term, the company will be 100% remote, but will look for an office space where its team can collaborate once a week so that “company culture doesn’t get lost in Zoom,” McDonald said.
