Our new funding will help Ignition better serve customers through further investment in our AI infrastructure, and customer success processes.
Today we’re thrilled to share that Ignition has raised a Seed round led by Audacious Ventures, which includes a prior pre-seed round led by Altman Capital and Bling Capital, bringing our total financing to $8M. This funding also brings with it an incredible collection of supporters such as Liquid2 Ventures, New Normal Fund, Irregular Expression, Moving Capital, and top C-level executives from Airbnb, Uber, Opendoor, Rippling, Webflow, and Amplitude.
These supporters have seen firsthand as both investors and operators just how broken the go-to-market process is at most companies, and we’re thrilled to have their decades of expertise across Product, Marketing, and Sales in our corner as we build out our vision to fix it.
Even more important than our backers though, we’re grateful to all our customers and prospects who have helped shape our vision and supported us through these early days. You’re the reason we’re able to build what we have today.
The widening GTM gap is leaving revenue on the table
The go-to-market process at most companies is completely broken. Product, sales, and marketing teams have become increasingly siloed and their tools have followed suit, leaving them without context, visibility, or repeatable ways of working together to achieve launch success. This results in billions of dollars annually in missed upsell and cross-sell opportunity, wasted development cost, and negative customer retention.
Widening silos within companies come at a time when product teams are under pressure to drive revenue. Companies have realized that the poor connectivity between Product Management and GTM teams is damaging their business. 40+% of new product launches fail to hit their revenue targets, 80+% of new features go unadopted, and 10+% of all revenue opportunity is left on the table thanks to poor GTM alignment.
As a result, they’re undertaking extreme organizational changes to resolve the problem.
Airbnb’s CEO Brian Chesky sparked a debate when he eliminated Product Managers entirely, only to clarify later on he was combining the role with Product Marketing to better connect development and go-to-market efforts. Tony Fadel, the “father of the iPod,” made similar arguments that the roles should be combined. Organizational changes are one way that leaders are aiming to address the issue, but we believe that the right technology can provide a scalable, long-term solution.
Alternatives force a tradeoff of automation vs. cross-functional flexibility, and require difficult org-wide adoption
Ultimately, the core problem here is that Go-to-Market is a complicated process with many teams, tasks, and tools involved. There’s lots to be done, from researching the market, to synthesizing that research into plans (both product plans and GTM plans), to creating and distributing the collateral that makes up your announcement campaigns.
The complexity of the process leaves existing alternatives woefully inadequate. Your options today are to either:
- Use infinitely-flexible, but completely-manual docs, spreadsheets, and project management tools to track and document work (but “do” none of it).
OR - Stitch together dozens of point solutions to automate the work involved, but suffer from silos, messy handoffs, and poor visibility.
Both of these options leave you with information loss across the team, confusion, and hundreds of hours spent on simple communication and coordination. And the worst part is that whichever path you choose, standardization fails because both options require EVERYONE to adopt the same tool(s) to be successful.
There has to be a better way, right?
Ignition was built to unify and automate this process from concept to launch
In an ideal world, you’d have a unified and automated process, designed to push information to teams where they live, rather than require them to “find” planning info.
Ignition is a GTM operations platform that aligns product, marketing, and sales teams, driving more successful go-to-market for new initiatives. It unifies the entire launch lifecycle in a single hub – from pre-launch research, to roadmapping, to GTM planning and internal orchestration, to post-launch measurement. The resulting single-source-of-truth reduces tool fragmentation and cost, while making cross-functional enablement dramatically simpler by pushing critical context to sales, success, and other teams in the tools they work in day-to-day.
By marrying AI and workflow technologies, Ignition also helps automate work at every step, to create repeatable, insight-driven processes. We help track competitive intelligence, identify product opportunities from sales data, build launch plans, generate on-brand marketing collateral, and answer enablement questions from teammates.
To see it all in action, check out this demo:
Customers love the product today, but this is just the beginning for our vision
We’ve already seen exciting demand among enterprises and midsized customers, and have helped guide over 2,500 product, feature, and marketing campaign launches.
“We were wrestling with inconsistency across a team of multiple Product Marketers — everyone had their own systems and processes for launching. Kajabi launches products, features, and campaigns at a very high velocity, so we were dealing with dozens of launches a quarter, each run differently. Ignition allowed us to create a scalable GTM process. It’s dead-simple to align PM<>PMMs, and increase visibility, effectiveness, and scalability.” - Tamara Grominsky, former VP PMM at Kajabi
With the funding, we’ll build our business team and hire GTM roles, so we can serve more customers. We’re also investing in continuing to advance our AI, so we can provide customers with fully-intelligent launch planning recommendations and content generation based on their past launch data and best practices, as well as their own brand guidelines and objectives.
“Now more than ever, product and marketing teams are being held accountable for the bottom line within businesses, which is leading to a seismic shift in how companies operate and forcing sales, marketing and product teams to be fully aligned on every initiative,” said Nakul Mandan, Audacious Ventures. “Ignition is the first company tackling this change from a technological standpoint, by leveraging a smart combination of AI and workflow technology to unify the process end-to-end. We believe the team at Ignition is uniquely positioned to build something that will quickly become ubiquitous at companies everywhere.“
Like many of the best products, Ignition was founded out of our own personal need for a better system when working on launches. I was the Director of Product Marketing at Rippling, where I scaled the org from Seed up to Series B and consistently wished I had a tool like Ignition in my arsenal. It was in this role where I cobbled together a first version of the product. My co-founder also faced similar issues during his time as a PM at Facebook, so we came together to build a solution.
We envision a world where context flows freely between product, marketing, and sales teams, without messy handoffs, costly alignment meetings, or disconnected hodgepodges of tools that nobody adopts. In that world, the launch process is so seamless that with little information, Ignition can generate an optimal, complete GTM plan, brief your entire team, generate marketing assets, and push messaging to internal teams and customers on every channel. If you’re inspired by our mission and are interested in checking out our product or learning more about Ignition, reach out at founders@haveignition.com.
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