Ascentage (formerly Centage)

Barry Klapp launched Centage (later renamed Ascentage) in 2003 with a deceptively simple observation: virtually every company in the world does budgeting, yet 70-80% still rely on Excel. This spreadsheet dependency created massive operational friction—complex models that were fragile, difficult to maintain, and nearly impossible to scale across multiple companies or divisions. Klapp, a 30-year sales and marketing veteran from IBM, saw an opportunity to build a purpose-built tool to replace the world's most ubiquitous—and most frustrating—budgeting workaround.

Ascentage spent its first 15 years as an on-premise licensed software company, targeting the sweet spot of $25-500 million revenue companies. The product accumulated around 1,000 customers over this period, each paying annual maintenance fees for locally hosted software. However, the world shifted to the cloud. Recognizing the market movement and the need to compete with better-funded competitors like Adaptive Insights (which had raised $175 million), Ascentage made a bold bet: they invested "three or four million dollars" to completely rewrite the product as a cloud-native SaaS application. This happened "last year" (relative to the 2015 interview date), marking the most significant pivot in the company's history.

Ascentage relied almost entirely on inside sales to acquire customers. Klapp built a scrappy sales machine: BDRs (Business Development Representatives) doing cold prospecting, promoted to account executives, supported by sales engineers for demos. Marketing spend was lean—roughly $100k/month across Google Ads, Facebook, webinars, trade shows (especially targeting Sage and Microsoft Dynamics user conferences), and email. The most memorable campaign was an emotionally resonant Excel 40th birthday video that positioned Ascentage as the modern alternative. It worked because their target customer—the 40-60 year-old CFO of a mid-market company—could relate to the nostalgia and urgency of upgrading legacy technology.

The company's hybrid revenue model proved effective: subscriptions formed the recurring base ($35-40k annual ACV), while implementation services contributed roughly one-third of total revenue. Each new customer required approximately one week of on-site training (costing $15k) to migrate from Excel-based budgets—essentially training masquerading as consulting. This upfront services revenue also helped recover customer acquisition costs faster. Churn was the persistent challenge: the on-premise model suffered 20% annual churn (80% retention), partly due to customer bankruptcies and executive departures—factors beyond Ascentage's control. However, the 300 customers who had already migrated to the new SaaS platform showed dramatically better retention, validating the strategic shift. Budget Maestro 9, the new product launched in May 2015, offered a radically simplified UI and consistent user experience across features that had accumulated over a decade.

Ascentage was at an inflection point. The previous year (2014) they'd crossed $12 million in revenue and were tracking toward $17 million in 2015. With 100 employees (mostly in Boston, with trainers distributed nationally), they were executing a carefully choreographed migration: converting 700 on-premise customers to the new SaaS platform while signing multi-year contracts instead of annual ones. The company had raised $13.5 million total—a remarkably capital-efficient figure relative to their $175 million-funded competitors. Klapp projected that moving the entire customer base to the SaaS model would push them past $30 million ARR. They were pursuing expansion revenue aggressively (10-20% year-on-year growth through upsells and seat expansion), targeting 90% retention once the migration was complete, and attracting interest from major PE firms (KKR, Great Hill Capital) who were tracking them for potential leverage buyouts. The company's profitable, repeatable playbook—lean sales-driven acquisition, strong gross margins (85-90%), and a secular tailwind in cloud adoption—positioned them as a formidable competitor despite their humble financial backing.