Supporting messaging for customer interactions for SaaS companies is growing in importance in an era where customers demand the immediacy of messaging to address their concerns. For SaaS applications that serve as a conduit between retail customers and providers, proper routing can become tricky. There’s also compliance to worry about. Telgorithm is a messaging platform that allows SaaS platforms to seamlessly integrate and incorporate sophisticated messaging solutions in their applications. The platform is built with compliance and deliverability in mind, ensuring that customers, consumers, and users are all protected. By adopting Telgorithim, SaaS platforms can avoid having to build and support native products that require coordination from product, engineering, and design resources. The startup founded by former ServiceTitan executives has started by addressing the pain point around messaging but is expanding to cover voice as well
LA TechWatch caught up with Telgorithm CEO Aaron Alter to learn more about the inspiration for the business, the company’s strategic plans, latest round of funding, and much, much more…
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
Bonfire Ventures, Daher Capital, Amplify.LA, and I2BF. Raised $3.8M and the most recent round was our Seed.
Tell us about your product or service.
Telgorithm is a messaging platform that allows SaaS providers to build and support messaging services in their software applications. With Telgorithm’s easy-to-understand RESTful APIs, streamlining compliance and message deliverability is quick. The Company is a hosted messaging provider, meaning that businesses that have numbers that share both voice and messaging services have the ability to seamlessly migrate the messaging portion to Telgorithm while retaining the voice services, on those very same numbers, with the current legacy provider. You can also purchase new numbers. Best of all, Telgorithm guarantees message deliverability, and we’re the first providers to offer this level of service!
What inspired the start of Telgorithm?
As the customer and designer of ServiceTitan’s voice and messaging products, we realized the importance of bundling functional and design needs into a seamless experience. During development, our team sifted through hundreds of hours of documentation, from different platform providers, to create a cohesive experience for the customer. We weren’t able to find a single provider that would allow us to accomplish all of this. There were always trade-offs with customer experience flexibility that we weren’t comfortable making. If we wanted more flexibility, we would increase the time-to-market drastically.
At the end of the day, launching a voice and messaging product requires extensive knowledge and many product, engineering, and design hours to build from the ground up. Even with a great platform partner, many SaaS companies are left with little flexibility to bring a customer experience that’s unique to their industry. We’re solving this problem because we’re passionate about enabling SaaS companies across the communication stack. We started with messaging. Up next, we’re building an integrated voice product that’s fully customizable and easily deployable with any SaaS application.
How is it different?
Our cloud communication stack is built for vertical SaaS providers specifically. Think of us as the vertical SaaS for vertical SaaS.
What market you are targeting and how big is it?
We’re beginning with vertical SaaS. We are intimately familiar with that audience. However, our ambitions are larger than messaging alone. We are building towards a unified communication stack and the global spend for unified communication will balloon to $140B by 2025.
What’s your business model?
At the moment, we’re a usage-based provider that charges per text message. However, we’re exploring other creative ways to price for our software providers that are just starting their businesses. We want to make sure we set them up for success, both infrastructurally and financially.
What are your post-COVID office plans??
We’re a fully remote company at the moment. As our team grows, we plan to explore other opportunities to deliver the best-in-class employee experience.
What was the funding process like?
Run your fundraising process like a sales funnel: Awareness, Acquisition, Negotiation, and Decision. Rule of thumb is to get to the decision stage within two to three weeks. Remember that this is a general case and every situation is unique.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
Biggest challenge for us at the beginning was nailing down our narrative. Once we got that down, the raising process became infinitely easier.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
Founder market fit.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
Grow awareness, activate more customers, delight customers, and hire more all-star employees.
Grow awareness, activate more customers, delight customers, and hire more all-star employees.
What advice can you offer companies in Los Angeles that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Equity financing isn’t always the optimal choice. Have a clear growth plan in place and then determine if capital will help you reach your objectives.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
Telgorithm is looking forward to helping vertical SaaS companies activate net new or improve existing message services. Additionally, we’re very excited for our next product, an integrated voice application that enables vertical SaaS companies to easily deploy a deskphone replacement from within the core application.
What’s your favorite outdoor activity in LA?
We’re an active bunch. Hiking, fishing, and barbecuing are all activities we enjoy together as cofounders.
