In this week’s Founder story, we’re introducing you to the very latest member of the Breega family, Qobra, who announced their 5 million euro seed round earlier this month.
Even in today’s age of advanced digitalisation, most businesses still struggle to manage their sales team’s commissions efficiently, often relying on manual processes and difficult-to decipher Excel files that are prone to errors.
As well as being time-consuming, such inefficiencies have a darker downside: they help fuel the dissatisfaction of sales reps to the extent that it is estimated as many as one in three leave their company within the first year, costing businesses 10% to 20% of their annual growth.
Qobra’s innovative no code platform — which plugs into virtually any CRM — serves a dual purpose. It provides sales reps with a real-time view of their actual and forecasted commissions, letting them know how far away they are from their next compensation target. It also enables sales ops to monitor whether their company compensation plan is doing its job of driving revenue to the business.
Back office processes are streamlined as compensation data is calculated and exported automatically to payroll software, reducing both errors and duplications and cutting out problem solving discussions between HR and sales teams at the end of the month.
Why Qobra ? What’s the story?
At only 25 years old, CEO Antoine Fort and his co-founders, Axel Poitral and Tanguy Moullec are the youngest founders to join the Breega portfolio and first time entrepreneurs. The strength and complementarity of founding team members is the first element Breega’s investment team looks at when deciding whether or not to invest in a startup.
During the exploration phase, Breega found that if the Qobra founders lacked experience, they made up for this in energy, organisation and drive.
The team were impressed by CEO Antoine’s focus, acute business sense and the fact that he was unafraid to make decisions that sometimes defy conventional practice, Antoine tells us:
“ We built the Qobra platform and signed our first clients quickly, before launching, and without building a free beta version for early adopters to test. This is unusual but we wanted to be up and running as soon as possible and to avoid providing a free or cheaper version of our solution as when something is free, it’s often seen as being of lesser value”.
Founded in the summer of 2020, Qobra chose to focus solely on startups with shorter sales cycles and a deeper understanding of the value-add of digital solutions. A decision that paid off. During the first 6 months, the team continually developed their solution with the help of their first clients, rapidly responding to requests for new features, fixing bugs and tweaking the Qobra interface to improve user experience.
Antoine also tells us that as paying customers, the Qobra users level of implication and feedback was far more qualitative than it would have been if they were non paying users:
“ Our first users were definitely instrumental in helping us build and develop our platform “.
By the end of their first year, Qobra had signed an impressive list of clients, including the French unicorn, Doctolib, whose 500 strong sales team has since adopted the platform with enthusiasm. Approached by several VCs at this point, and convinced that it was time to ramp up, Qobra started to meet with potential investors, including, we’re happy to say, Breega 🙂
Why Breega ?
“ We met around 20 VCs and received several offers. We chose Breega because of the strong support we knew we’d get from everyone in the fund and also because of their team attitude. They seemed more like partners than investors that would pressure us for financial results. We don’t need pressure to help us progress. Being ambitious, I’ve always put the bar high. I like being challenged but I don’t need a slap on the wrist to go further and faster “.
With 30 very enthusiastic clients to their name and having certified over 100M€ in commissions on their platform, we would deem that to be true 🙂
With their 5 million seed raise behind them, the Qobra founders will now be focused on further developing their team and platform. Their goal ? To create a global platform that will address other established pain points for sales teams such as arbitrary and constantly changing quotas and unfair management of territories.
Its an ambitious project but our first-time founders are not phased, when asked what their main driver is, Antoine tells us:
“ We want to experience Qobra both as a stepping stone to a better version of ourselves and at the same time as the culmination of our journey “.
It’s a journey that is well under way and set to continue, Qobra is a powerful tool with significant potential to become a complete sales suite providing real value-add for businesses and their sales teams. Breega is delighted to be accompanying the team on their journey to becoming the leading European sales software providers. Watch this space.
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Qobra are currently hiring, for more information on this, check out their Welcome to the Jungle page.
Originally published at https://www.breega.com on March 17, 2022.
