Companies are falling short of their potential because they don’t have the resources to access insights that enable faster growth. So argues Household itemsa US-based start-up today announcing a $2.1 million seed funding round that it hopes will help accelerate sales of its data and insight platform.
Houseware focuses on the popular software-as-a-service (SaaS) sector, where companies around the world race to achieve sustainable growth – and overcome macroeconomic uncertainty and volatility. “Many SaaS companies reach maturity, but they lack the cross-functional data they need to move forward quickly,” said Divyansh Saini, the CEO of Houseware, who co-founded the company with colleague Shubhankar Srivastava. “We want to enable them to do that.”
Saini’s diagnosis of the problem – based in part on his own experience with growing SaaS companies – is that key decision makers don’t have quick and clear access to the information they need to drive growth, especially in a fast-paced and volatile market environment. Business leaders with revenue responsibilities, in particular, cannot get the data and insights they need to act in a timely manner.
That reflects two issues, says Houseware. First, Sani argues, the data decision makers need today is increasingly cross-functional. For example, marketing doesn’t get the full picture if it only sees marketing data; it also needs data from sales, from product development, from finance and more. And second, Sani adds, while some companies have established data teams and units to address this challenge, they need time to respond to requests from business users.
Houseware’s solution is to allow functional teams to access cross-functional data themselves, rather than having to rely on data teams to generate a report. Indeed, the company’s name is a pun on the word warehouse: “Houseware turns the typical model of waiting for insights from a data warehouse on its head,” Haini explains.
The idea is that an executive in, say, the marketing function should have easy access to company-wide data on the go, generating the insight needed to make smarter marketing decisions. To meet that need, Houseware pulls data from all the apps and tools the company currently uses. “The true identity of a user, customer, invoice or transaction is distributed across hundreds of point-solution tools,” Haini argues.
Homeware founders Divyansh Saini and Shubhankar Srivastava
The company is making some big promises about what its platform can do. Data and insight requests that used to take a company three weeks to use data teams can now be secured in a matter of days, Haini says. “The time to reliable insight is drastically shortened,” he promises. “It also means organizations can discover new insights they hadn’t previously considered.”
The company is still in its infancy, but Haini points out that among customers who have already adopted the platform, a third of users already use it daily. “Executives in the revenue function are under tremendous pressure to find avenues for growth,” he says. “Metrics and access to these insights to run experiments are at the heart of this problem; Household items are becoming business critical.”
The company’s investors now believe they can benefit from a strong start. The $2.1 million round is led by Tanglin Venture Partners with participation from GTMfund and Better Capital, as well as a number of high-profile angel investors best known for their roles with leading SaaS companies, including Snowflake, Superhuman, Stripe and Zendesk.
“During my time as a GTM operator at various SaaS companies, I would have loved to have had something like Houseware,” said Scott Barker, co-founder and partner at GTMFund. “The experience of being able to work with use cases across segments is powerful for any scaling SaaS company looking for its alpha – and even more important now during this downturn.”
Houseware plans to use its seed money to grow its customer base, expand its team, and double down on alliances with partners like Snowflake.
