Aligned lands $5.8 million to streamline sales process for B2B buyers and sellers

While the business-to-consumer (B2C) sector has undergone significant changes over the years, the way buyers and sellers in the business-to-business (B2B) space collaborate has remained mostly unchanged, with communication still relying heavily on email threads, attachments, and spreadsheet links.

The inefficacy and outdated sales process have resulted in a frustrating purchasing experience and fewer deals being closed. Just recently, Gartner reports that 77% of B2B buyers “rated their purchase experience as extremely complex or difficult.” Interestingly, Gartner also found that the abundance of high-quality information available to buyers is a significant factor contributing to the complexity of making a purchase decision.

For example, a typical buying group involves six to ten stakeholders, each of whom consults four to five sources of information. The challenge is then to reconcile the information gathered and reach a consensus. Now, one tech startup is on a mission to address these challenges and re-streamline decades-old sales workflows.

Enter Aligned, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based startup that’s building the first B2B buyer-seller network aimed at simplifying interactions between sellers and buyers, with the goal of promoting more efficient collaboration throughout the entire life cycle of a deal. The Aligned platform offers a workspace for sales and customer success teams to manage their deals, simplify decision-making, and help them exceed their sales quotas. It also serves as a platform for customers to interact with sellers throughout the entire sales process.

With thousands of users and hundreds of new companies joining every month, Aligned announced today it has closed a $5.8 million seed round led by Hetz Ventures and NFX, with additional backing from global strategic sales leaders and angel investors.

Aligned will use the fresh capital infusion to expand its team to meet increasing demand, enhance its platform with innovative deal analytics and AI, and assist in establishing the first professional global network of B2B sellers and buyers.

Founded in 2021 by CEO Gal Aga, CPO Gal Deitsch, and CTO Yotam Sela, Aligned aims to revolutionize the B2B buying experience by providing a streamlined and transparent platform for collaborating with sellers. Its solution keeps buyers informed about all aspects of the deal pipeline process, including progress updates and status changes, creating a more efficient and effective process.

In a statement, CEO Aga said: “B2B buying and selling is a chaotic process involving numerous stakeholders and often months of back and forth, with many blind spots and moving parts to control. These modern times present a game-changing opportunity to do what companies like Slack and Zoom did to the way we connect, which in the case of Aligned, is to make buying and selling more impactful for both sides, even enjoyable. We’re passionate about leading this change to make the B2B buying and selling experience frictionless, collaborative, and streamlined.”

Aligned’s approach to collaboration sets the groundwork for the establishment of the initial network of B2B sellers and buyers, which will allow for the development of publicly accessible profiles, communication with potential clients, and completion of all deal-related activities within the platform while taking advantage of increased trustworthiness and the network effect.

“Aligned has identified a major gap in the sales tech market that demands a more effective collaborating experience that enables both parties to stay focused on their long-term goals,” said James Currier, General Partner at NFX. “By creating the first and only network for buyers and sellers that’s fully focused on improving the customer journey, Aligned is tapping into the root of B2B sales inefficiency to pioneer the next household name for buyer-seller interactions.”