London-based startup Limio raises about $0.5M in pre-seed funding to offer a no-code subscription commerce platform

Subscription-based business model is common among many online businesses. While subscriptions are an increasingly popular business model, this monetization model still requires quite a lot of developer and tech resources for businesses to launch, grow and manage at scale. Limio is a London-based tech startup that is solving this problem by helping businesses to acquire and retain subscribers.

Limio is taking every aspect of the subscriber experience process from landing pages, to checkouts, to self-service portals, to emails, etc… and making sure business people can manage the subscriber experience without code across different countries, currencies, languages etc… We call it a no-code subscription platform or a ‘Shopify for subscriptions.’

Today, Limio announced today that it has raised $421,000 (£325,000) to continue to develop its no-code Subscription Commerce platform. The funding came from 15 angel investors including co-founder and CEO Amaury de Closse. Other backers include Michael Pennington (Gumtree), Matt Clifford (Entrepreneur First), Scott Sage and Krishna Visvanathan (Crane VC).

The raise follows 18 months of software development and market research with the product already in use by select customers in media and retails, such as ii.co.uk and 31Dover. Limio is building a SaaS solution which aims to help subscription businesses to launch, grow and scale their subscription business with no-code.

Founded in 2017 by CEO Amaury de Closset (formerly of GoCardless) and Daniel Morton (Zuora, Three), Limio is a no-code Subscription Commerce Platform, enabling you to operate your subscription business with extra speed and at a lower cost. Our Platform includes Content Management System (CMS), Product Information Management (PIM), Digital Asset Management (DAM) capabilities specifically made for subscriptions, enabling your marketers to get to market new shops, campaigns and promotions faster than ever. No IT, no developments.

Small businesses can directly build highly customizable subscription commerce websites and self-service subscriber portals with no need for developers to integrate into complex billing APIs. For larger enterprises, Limio is taking a low-code approach where marketers can still self-serve with no-code but developers can also tap in modular APIs to plug-in with the rest of their company infrastructure, such as a CRM like Salesforce.

“Daniel and I identified a gap market in the subscription industry. If you look at traditional eCommerce, you’ve got no-code options like Shopify where you can launch a shop quickly and be up and running in days. In subscriptions, we’re still stuck in a world where you have to integrate with billing providers which can take months. Subscriptions have notoriously complex logic, which make API documentation hard to understand and forces developers to build a lot of custom-logic which ultimately limits the marketers ability to create new campaigns and trial new strategies. One of our customers had their shop live and ready to take orders in 48 hours.” says Amaury, CEO of Limio.

Limio estimates that these businesses are losing millions each year from loss sales due to slow time-to-market, lack of offer management flexibility, or clunky subscriber experiences which leads to low conversion and churn, as well as high costs due to developers being dragged in to troubleshoot day-to-day marketing operations.

The founders have considerable experience in the subscription industry. Amaury grew GoCardless offering in France before the team went on several rounds of subsequents fundings from GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Salesforce Ventures. Daniel Morton, on the other hand, helped shape Zuora as the leader for order-to-cash management and was deeply involved in Three’s subscription architecture.

Damien Lane, partner at Episode1, comments: “Subscriptions are radically changing many industries like retail, education, and gaming and is becoming the de-facto standard way of consuming software, media content, and utilities. But it’s still a difficult type of business to run, and it’s becoming increasingly complex as competition heats up and marketers have to launch ever more complex marketing strategies to stand out. Having developers focussed on subscription maintenance rather than the actual product being sold is not only a waste of precious resources, but it’s also something that slows down businesses, creates bottlenecks and disenfranchises marketers. That’s why we’re excited about Limio’s no-code approach to subscriptions, which means marketers have an actionable tool to increase their conversion and retention rates and can get their strategies faster to market.”

“Subscriptions are the next big thing in business, and Limio is taking a marketing-led approach to this industry, focusing on the subscriber experience rather than taking the traditional billing or financial approach to it. As founders, Amaury and Daniel are bringing deep expertise into this world, having helped many subscription businesses to launch in the past and seeing all the pain points they have in getting new offerings to market. As a subscriber myself, I’m excited about their mission of delivering better experiences to customers.”