TestBox, an early stage startup, aims to make testing software you want to purchase easier in your own environment. Plus, it’s pre-populated with synthetic data similar to yours.
Today, the company announced a $10 million seed round to continue building the solution.
For now, the company is focused on helping customers test popular customer support software with plans to expand into sales and marketing tools and eventually other software categories in the coming months.
“Our goal has always been to focus on one software category first and really understand that category and build a playbook from there before expanding into other categories. We are fortunate that our playbook now falls within the category of customer support software,” company co-founder Sam Senior told me.
He said their original vision was to be a test market where companies can find the software they want to test and easily run it, but he notices that sales teams are asking to use test boxes for their company’s products.
“We also find that salespeople say our version of their product is a much simpler, much more intuitive version of a proof of concept than they can build for their own prospects. And they actually start using TestBox when they talk to a prospect and the prospect says ‘hey, I need a trial environment or proof of concept demo’, and they now get instant access to it at the click of a button when they get a test box for their customer,” he said.
To encourage this activity more, the company is releasing a new product called TestBox for Sales, which allows them to provide their prospects with a fully configured trial environment. the. They are replacing other click-through demo platforms with TestBox,” he said.
An interesting aspect of the product is that it uses GPT3 technology to build a synthetic dataset based on the types of data you would find in that particular type of software. So in customer software, that includes the customer’s name, items that the customer has purchased, the last interactions, and so on.
This gives the customer a way to test the viability of the product in their own environment, using data similar to theirs, but without using real customer data.
The business model works like this: The TestBox is free for potential customers to use, but when they buy it, TestBox gets a share of the sale and in some cases the recurring revenue from that sale.
The company currently has 15 employees, up from six when we spoke to the company about the $2.7 million pre-seed financing around this time last year. With the new financing and new requirements, the company is looking to expand further.
He says DEIB is a big part of how he builds his team. “It’s a really big part of building our team, and if you look at our team page, I’m really proud to feel that we have a representative sample of people in North America. We invest very deeply in it. And it does mean it takes time to hire people, but we have to keep doing that,” he said. The company also has a diverse board to further promote those values.
Today’s round was led by Felicis Ventures with the participation of SignalFire and Firstminute Capital. The company has now raised approximately $13 million.