Arik Hesseldahl

Recent Posts by Arik Hesseldahl

Gainsight Raises $9 Million From Battery Ventures, Names Mehta CEO

Meet Gainsight. Until yesterday, it was a startup known as JBara Software. Today it changed its name, announced the closing of a $9 million Series A round of venture capital funding and named a new CEO. So it’s something of a big day for this small company.

First the funding: Gainsight said today that it has landed $9 million in a round led by Battery Ventures. Roger Lee, a Battery Ventures partner, led the deal.

Founded last year and based in Mountain View, Calif., Gainsight aims to use Big Data analytics to help companies hold on to their customers by making sure they’re getting the most out of the products and services they buy. How much would you pay to get an early warning that a key customer was at risk of bolting to a competitor’s product because they misunderstand something about yours?

Gainsight has a phrase for it: Customer Success Management. I call it churn reduction, but whatever you call it, it’s a pretty powerful idea, and already companies like Jive, Marketo and Eloqua (now a unit of Oracle) have signed on.

It’s an idea that founder Jim Eberlin happened upon at his old company, Host Analytics, which he ran for more than a decade. Which brings us to the new CEO. Gainsight named Nick Mehta (pictured), the former CEO of LiveOffice, a cloud-based email archiving outfit that’s now part of Symantec, as its new CEO. Eberlin will take on a product development role full-time.

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Nobody was excited about paying top dollar for a movie about WikiLeaks. A film about the origins of Pets.com would have done better.

— Gitesh Pandya of BoxOfficeGuru.com comments on the dreadful opening weekend box office numbers for “The Fifth Estate.”