Catalyst, a tech startup founded by two brothers, just raised $15 million from Accel to help businesses improve customer experience

Catalyst, a customer success platform (CSP) startup, today announced it raised $15 million in a series A funding round to hire more engineers and designers, as well as accelerate customer success hiring and sales to meet record market demand. The round was led by Accel. Catalyst had previously raised $2.4 million in seed funding  led by True Ventures with follow-up funding of $3 million from Work-Bench.

Founded in 2017 by two brothers, Edward Chiu and Kevin Chiu, the New York City-based Catalyst was born out of frustration and necessity. The duo were tired of sifting between meeting notes, juggling email campaigns, tracking down product statistics, prioritizing customer needs and navigating a sea of tabs and windows. After evaluating several tools on the market, they found them to be difficult to use and some required almost half a year just to implement. Before founding Catalyst. co-founder  and CEO Edward Chiu worked at DigitalOcean, where he built customer success software. Their existing customers include Gremlin, Helpshift, Sysdig and Tray.io.

Dubbed as the world’s most intuitive Customer Success Platform (CSP), Catalyst integrates with all the tools you’re already using to provide one centralized view of customer data. Customer Success Managers can proactively take the right actions to prevent churn, such as receiving automated alerts when a customer is not using certain features that are critical to their success.

“We’re seeing a major shift in how businesses think about managing their customers,” said Edward Chiu, CEO and Co-Founder of Catalyst. “Improving customer experience is now a top priority for any high-performing organization, and customer-facing teams need a single source of truth to easily gauge customer health. They also want the ability to automate recurring tasks, in order to save time that can be reinvested back into the customer — all of this is made simple with Catalyst.”

One of the most unique features of Catalyst is the ability to align an entire company with the customer success mission. Not only does the platform act as a foundational tool for CS teams, it brings together Product Managers, Sales, Marketers, Engineers and the C-Suite. According to Deloitte’s 2019 Enterprise Customer Success (CS) Study, businesses that adopt customer success broadly across their organization “drive deeper customer relationships and uncover more revenue growth opportunities they might have otherwise missed.” However, the study goes on to report that “very few companies have been able to elevate the strategic importance of CS within their organizations.”

“I’ve never seen a tool get adopted as quickly as Catalyst,” said Joshua Sanders, Head of Customer Success at Tray.io. “Not only does my team use it every day, but our engineers, product, and executives all want access due to the context it surfaces regarding customer engagement and their corresponding projects.”

Catalyst features include: Simplified Dashboards, which helps to locate and visualize critical information related to customers quickly and easily, including meeting notes, detailed communication timelines, and customer data such as product adoption stats, support tickets, contract data, and more. Other features include customer segment builder, automated task and lifecycle management, and organized note taking.

The new $15 Million in funding will go towards hiring engineers and designers to maintain the beautiful user experience while adding robust and powerful new features. The founders also plan to build a strong community around customer success by hosting various events across the country, including the first-ever customer success conference by Catalyst with more details coming soon.

“Edward and Kevin built Catalyst from the ground up with customer success teams in mind,” said Vas Natarajan, Partner at Accel. “From the first demo of the product, we knew this was a transformational platform for businesses looking to better manage their customer base.”

Catalyst Team