Sales experience platform Walnut has raised USD15 million in Series A funding led by Eight Roads Ventures, a global VC managing USD8 billion of assets, with portfolio companies such as AppsFlyer, Alibaba, Hibob and Made.com.
This funding round comes just several months after a high-demand USD6 million seed round, bringing the total funding raised to date to USD21 million, less than a year after it was founded. Seed investors include NFX, A Capital, Liquid2, Graph ventures and leading figures in the tech industry from Google, Wix, HubSpot, GitHub and more.
Walnut aims to make demos, as they are performed today, obsolete. Founders Yoav Vilner and Dani Friedland have set out to redefine how SaaS companies improve their Go-To-Market with a holistic approach.
The no-code platform enables teams to create customised product demos quickly and efficiently, integrate them into their sales and marketing processes, and generate insights – all functionalities which in-house development, the traditional way of creating demos, often do not provide sufficiently.
Vilner coined the name Walnut saying: “We believe that out of all of the challenges B2B companies face, demonstrating the product is the toughest nut to crack”.
Prior to Walnut, sales demos were a nightmare for all sides: generic experiences for the prospect, hardly any insights and clarity for the team leader – and internal friction between back-end teams and customer-facing teams.
While most sales products out there focus on the needs of the company – Walnut helps organisations become customer-centric, lowering barriers for demo creation and increasing the quality of the overall buying experience.
Walnut has grown to serve over 60 B2B clients, including Adobe, NetApp, Varonis, People AI, and many more, pioneering one of the hottest tech categories of the year. The start-up has also been featured in prestigious rankings such as “Top Must-Have Startup for 2021”, Will Reed’s “Top 50 Seed-Stage Startups To Work For” and Product Hunt’s “Top Product Of the Week”.
The funds will be used to grow the team across its different offices in the US, Europe and Israel, as well as continue developing its unique technology and platform.
CEO Vilner says: “It has been an amazing first year for Walnut. We’re honored to have such experienced investors put their trust in us yet again. Our commercial traction and product value have been faster than we could have imagined.”
Davor Hebel and Eyal Rabinovich from Eight Roads Ventures says: “Covid has accelerated the trend towards remote sales, though the process started long before the pandemic. Most companies lack the automation and digital scalability to deliver the experience buyers seek. Walnut’s platform approach to demos and the overall sales experience significantly help companies address today’s dynamic challenges. We have been very impressed by the rapid growth Walnut has achieved over the last year and we are thrilled to partner with Yoav and the team as it looks to become a category leader.”
Gigi-Levy Weiss, General partner at NFX, adds: “In the last few months since leading Walnut’s seed round, we have seen their no-code demo and remote sales platform skyrocket in demand, including from Fortune 500 companies. It’s the perfect combination of great team and product at exactly the right time in the market. We’re looking forward to their continued growth.”
