- Kizen is a code-free platform that automates companies’ sales, marketing, and operations teams.
- The startup raised a “supergiant” seed round, or a seed round of more than $10 million, from former executives.
- Here’s an exclusive look at the pitch deck used by Kizen’s six-time founder to raise $12 million.
John Winner first caught the startup bug at age 13, when he started a business in his suburban Florida neighborhood fixing his neighbors’ computers.
Now, five startups later, Winner is a cofounder and the CEO of Kizen, a startup that helps enterprises automate their sales, marketing, and operations teams without the use of code.
Kizen recently raised $12 million in seed funding from former C-suite executives including Susan Sheskey, a former Dell chief information officer, and Scott Helbing, a former AT&T chief marketing officer, as well as from Gloria Fu, a former managing director at JPMorgan Asset Management. This round is a “supergiant” seed round, where startups have raised over $10 million in seed funding.
Winner first experienced the need for Kizen software while consulting for businesses through his agency, Scientific Marketing Group. In this role, Winner said he often witnessed companies using more than 100 tech tools, such as customer relationship management tools and data-analytics software, which led to customer data being locked up in team and this tool.
This, combined with a tight labor market, convinced Winner that businesses needed a software program to simplify and automate mundane tasks, such as tracking customers and sending marketing emails, to employees can spend their limited time on higher order tasks.
With Kizen sales software, salespeople can view reminders of which actions are most effective in closing deals and automating tasks and reminders. For example, a salesperson might receive a suggestion from Kizen to contact a prospective customer if it’s been weeks since they last spoke.
The startup’s marketing tools help companies send personalized emails and text ads, understand customer behavior by tracking website clicks, and analyze marketing performance through data analytics. Kizen also offers code-free solutions for other operations teams, allowing employees to use drag-and-drop technology to send emails.
Winner says Kizen is faster to deploy than competitors and legacy providers like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Oracle, and more comprehensive in its offerings than up-and-coming players like project-management company Monday.com and the collaborative-app-building startup Airtable.
He said Insider Kizen’s $12 million “supergiant” seed round, which is a seed funding round of more than $10 million, is a “rolling raise,” or a funding round that raises capital from multiple investors within a long time, often over a year , and then roll up that capital in a single funding announcement.
Here’s an exclusive look at the 17-slide pitch deck automation startup Kizen used to raise $12 million in seed funding from former C-suite executives.