Stigg Raises $17.5M to Revolutionize SaaS Pricing and Monetization

Stigg makes it easy to change your SaaS pricing | TechCrunch

Stigg (not The Stig, just Stigg) describes itself as "the first scalable monetization platform for the modern billing stack." There's a lot going on in that sentence, but what it comes down to is that the startup, which on Wednesday announced a $17.5 million Series A round, helps SaaS companies model pricing, create pricing pages, decide (and change) which features and usage allotments should go with which pricing plan, manage customers, and more. One nifty aspect of Stigg is that it does all of this with an SDK that is available in most popular languages and aims to stay out of the developer's way. The company was founded by Dor Sasson and Anton Zagrebelny, who previously worked together at New Relic. "I was leading the AI machine learning product line at New Relic," Sasson told me. "Anton was building together with me, and we were the first team that was involved in trying to monetize AI for the first time. New Relic was a large public company, selling to developers. We were mainly [using a] seat-based model, and we had new leadership with aspirations and bullish ideas around usage-based pricing and how we can layer more and more consumption-based models into our how we go to market. It turned out to be tremendously difficult to drive home safely such a major pricing and packaging change in the scope and the volume, and complexity of a public company such as New Relic." As with all good startup founding stories, the founders saw this as a gap in the market and decided to tackle it themselves. The team raised a $6.4 million seed round in 2021 (announced in 2022) from institutional investors like Unusual Ventures and Emerge Ventures, as well as a number of prominent angel investors. Today, Stigg counts the likes of AI21labs, Cloudinary, PagerDuty, Miro, and Webflow among its users. Specifically, the advent of AI-based features, Sasson said, is making a lot of SaaS companies revisit their current pricing plans. "AI is also disrupting everything we thought about how you sell and monetize software. Traditionally software is being sold with a subscription-based model -- with, sometimes, a little bit of consumption layered onto it. Today, with AI, we see more and more companies actually looking to sell differently, looking to introduce outcome-based pricing concepts, or work-based pricing concepts," Sasson said. Traditionally, a lot of the pricing models and entitlements (that is, the features that come with your specific pricing plan), are hard coded into the application, which adds a lot of friction when you want to make any changes. When you want to to modernize this stack and solve for speed, and flexibility, you need to build the right tooling for the engineers who have to implement it. But you also need the right tools for the go-to-market team to make changes to pricing plans when needed -- and without having to get the developers to rewrite a lot of code. For them, Stigg offers a management console that lets them do all of that. "The key principle here is to start decoupling dollars and commercial concepts from hard-coded configurations related to actual features and usage and experiences, so that the engineering team can help the business introduce new ways to package and model -- and ultimately commercialize software -- without having to worry about the downstream implications of the commercial aspects of such of those elements," Sasson explained. The new funding round was led by Red Dot Capital Partners, with participation from Unusual Ventures, Emerge Ventures, Redseed, and Cerca Partners.

Stigg raises $17.5M to simplify SaaS platform and feature pricing models - SiliconANGLE

Stigg raises $17.5M to simplify SaaS platform and feature pricing models Unified monetization platform startup Stigg Inc. says it's ready to help businesses implement more dynamic and flexible pricing strategies after closing on a $17.5 million early-stage round of funding today. The Series A round was led by Red Dot Capital Partners and saw participation from Unusual Ventures, Emerge Ventures, Cerca Partners and Redseed, and adds to the $6.5 million in funding the startup had previously raised. Stigg's monetization platform is designed to help companies of all shapes and sizes modernize their payment and billing infrastructure, so they can iterate on new payment models much faster than before. Companies need to do this, Stigg argues, because the rapid adoption of generative artificial intelligence in software-as-a-service products is transforming the way software is sold. These days, businesses must be able to support numerous models and revenue channels at once, such as consumption-based pricing and AI credits, as well as subscription models and those based on usage. The challenge is that standard billing systems don't support this kind of flexibility. Generally, they're integrated with products in an ad hoc way, which means engineering teams have to spend weeks or even months making complex changes across their billing infrastructure, customer relationship management systems and product platforms. Stigg changes that. It's a kind of middleware that sits between SaaS-based applications and the billing infrastructure, where it facilitates the rapid rollout of flexible pricing plans, including hybrid models, bundles, usage-based billing and more. It makes it simple for engineering teams to model all of the different features and functionality within software products that can potentially be monetized. They can flexibly define and organize offerings across products, plans, packages and add-ons, without making any substantial code changes. So instead of cobbling together different feature flags and data pipelines, businesses can access a unified system to quickly orchestrate changes to the way they bill customers for using their apps. One of the key features of Stigg's platform is that it enables developers to build granular access at the feature level, using a flexible domain model. At the core of its platform is an "entitlement management" application programming interface that deals with configuration, metering and access control. That API connects with various third-party billing systems, customer relationship management services, pricing pages and product experiences, making it simple to deploy and experiment with new monetization plans. Stigg co-founder and Chief Executive Dor Sasson (pictured left, alongside Chief Technology Officer Anton Zagrebelny) said monolithic billing systems are a legacy concept that dramatically slows business growth, hindering companies' efforts to iterate on new pricing models. "Companies need the flexibility to serve different market segments differently, especially as they layer in AI capabilities and expand into new channels," he explained. "We're giving engineering teams the infrastructure to help businesses move faster. After adopting Stigg and rapidly deploying new pricing models and AI features, our clients massively exceeded their quarterly revenue targets, which shows the power of getting monetization infrastructure right." The startup claims that it's already managing billions of API calls and tens of millions of monthly subscriptions for its customers, including the AI collaboration platform Miro Inc., generative AI model creator AI21 Labs Inc., web design firm Webflow Inc. and the application observability firm PagerDuty Inc. Atad Peled of Red Dot Capital said he's investing in Stigg because he has witnessed dozens of teams at his portfolio companies struggle to adapt their monetization infrastructure to support new AI features and business models "Stigg's technology addresses a critical pain point that's only growing more acute," he said. "The company's zero churn rate and strong customer momentum demonstrates that it has built something truly essential for modern software companies."