Business

Software start-up Lative raises $3m in funding

Company specialises in sales performance, efficiency and planning

Niall McEvoy, Elkstone; Laura Tortosa Sancho, Lative; Jenny Melia, Enterprise Ireland and Werner Schmidt, Lative. Dublin-headquartered Lative has raised $3m a funding round led by Elkstone. Photograph: Orla Murray/Coalesce

Ciara O'Brien
Thu Jan 18 2024 - 05:00

Irish headquartered software start-up Lative has raised $3 million (€2.7 million) in a seed funding round that will help support the company’s growth.

The funding round was led by Elkstone Ventures, with support from Enterprise Ireland. Handshake Ventures, which previously invested in Beautiful.ai, 1Qbit and SteamElements, has also come on board as a new investor, with existing investors WestWave Capital, and Future Five also backing the company again, alongside a number of angel investors.

Lative, which specialises in sales performance, efficiency and planning, was set up in 2022 by Werner Schmidt and Laura Tortosa Sancho.

Using the platform, companies can get a greater understanding of their sales performance, cost efficiency and return on investment, and easily simulate future capacity and investment plans so companies can hire in the right areas of their business for maximum impact.

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“If you are a sales organisation, you need to do capacity planning,” Mr Schmidt said. “In essence Lative automates the process. It’s more structured.”

Lative plans to invest some of the funding in its strategy and further developing its platform, building an insights and benchmarking module to help improve decision-making.

“The preseed round allowed us to prove we could build the product and get people to use it,” Mr Schmidt said. “We can now continue to build the platform and our go to market.”

It plans to expand its team, hiring for key sales, marketing and finance roles based at its Dublin headquarters, adding up to six people to the team.

Although the company had a number of US venture capital firms interested in leading the round, it committed to Elkstone at an early stage.

“Lative is making sales teams more efficient, by replacing spreadsheets with software that can drastically improve sales results,” said Niall McEvoy, partner at Elkstone Ventures.

“The platform is potentially category-defining for sales team management.”

Ciara O'Brien

Ciara O'Brien

Ciara O'Brien is an Irish Times business and technology journalist

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