Kuvama

Alex Smith's 20-year career in B2B SaaS—spanning sales, pre-sales, delivery, and customer success—gave him a front-row seat to a fundamental problem. As the industry shifted from on-premise perpetual licenses to subscription models, companies struggled to adapt. They'd add a customer success team or train sales on value selling, but it was never a joined-up, customer-centric approach. "I've seen a lot of companies struggle to catch up with the new reality," Alex recalled. The insight was clear: the entire customer journey—from marketing through sales to retention—needed to be built around the customer's success outcomes, not just feature adoption.

Kuvama started in 2017 as a consulting agency with three full-time employees and rotating contractors. For years, they solved customer value management problems the old-fashioned way: consulting projects and Excel-based tools. But in 2020, Alex spotted an opportunity to build a SaaS product. "We didn't have a clear plan from day one that this would become a SaaS," he explained. "We discovered the opportunity through consulting and learning that this problem couldn't be solved at scale that way." In summer 2020, they built a prototype. In October 2020, they won a £100,000 UK government innovation grant linked to COVID recovery. With that capital, they brought on contractors and started real code development. By Q2 2021, they signed their first customer contract.

Their first customers came through their existing consulting network and credibility. Today, they have 4 paying customers actively using the SaaS platform, with the other 11 customers from earlier years having been served via consulting engagements or Excel-based solutions. The pricing model reflects enterprise complexity: a platform fee plus per-user licenses, ranging from $50,000 to $200,000 per year depending on company size and number of users (BDRs, STRs, salespeople, pre-sales teams, customer success managers). "At the moment it ranges from maybe $50,000 per year up to around $200,000 per year," Alex said.

The consulting-first approach validated the problem but revealed a hard truth: you can't scale value management consulting indefinitely. What worked was building credibility and deep customer understanding over years. What didn't was trying to solve the problem without a cohesive platform. Alex's background in packaging and pricing for SaaS companies informed their go-to-market, but he acknowledged they're still refining the monetization model. The upsell strategy combines user growth and the sale of additional modules to support the end-to-end customer journey. Alex also emphasized that their solution requires setup and implementation support—"it's not a plug-and-play SaaS app." This reality meant they needed capital to invest not just in product but in delivery and customer success functions.

In 2021, the combined agency-plus-SaaS entity generated close to $1M in revenue, mostly from consulting. In 2022, that mix would gradually shift. The team stood at 4 full-time employees plus 5-6 contractors. Then came the pre-seed round: £1.1M (~$1.4M USD) at a ~$10-20M valuation (priced equity round). That capital would fund platform acceleration, hiring up to 9 full-time employees, and investment in delivery and customer success. Alex's bet was that the market was on the cusp of explosive growth—Gartner was starting to track and validate the customer value management category. His differentiation against larger players like Gainsight (focused only on the customer success phase) was clear: Kuvama integrates across the entire customer journey, connecting marketing, sales (CRM, HubSpot, Salesforce), and customer success (Gainsight) into one value-driven platform.