Consensus Raises $110 Million for Intelligent Demo Automation Platform

Consensus has raised $110 million from Sumeru Equity Partners to grow its intelligent demo automation platform.

The platform helps B2B sellers produce, distribute and track the progress of interactive video demos. These demos provide the digital-first approach preferred by today’s B2B buyers, Consensus said in a Wednesday (March 8) press release.

“Our offering combines a sophisticated, enterprise-grade product with a philosophical shift that has led many of the world’s biggest enterprise software companies to re-orient their entire sales approach to a buyer enablement model that reduces friction and accelerates the buying process,” Consensus founder and CEO Garin Hess said in the release.

PYMNTS research has found that there’s a steady trend toward digitization in the B2B space, with a growing share of interactions between buyers and sellers taking place digitally.

This move toward virtual B2B platforms is occurring amid shifting workplace demographics with millennials — widely regarded as the first “digital-native” generation — steadily accounting for growing portions of the global workforce, according to the “Innovating B2B Payments Report,” a PYMNTS and i2c collaboration.

Millennials are already responsible for making three-quarters of professional B2B purchasing decisions, the report said.

B2B enterprise transactions are also starting to take more and more behavioral cues from today’s hyper-personalized, convenient and real-time consumer experience journey.

As PYMNTS reported Feb. 27, that’s why companies across industries are investing in digital technologies and integrated enterprise solutions.

The Consensus platform enables companies to build a reusable library of video demos, automatically personalize the content to the buyer and, as the buyer shares the video demo with others, discover other stakeholders in the buying group, according to the press release.

These capabilities speed up the product education and sales process and enable sellers to spend more time on higher-value activities, the release said.

The firm increased its revenue by 60% in 2022, has “just begun to scratch the surface” and is ready to scale its product, Sumeru Managing Director Jason Babcoke said in the release.

“Consensus created a transformational product with a strong value proposition that is uniquely suited to modern sales processes post-COVID, enabling customers to grow faster via improved sales conversion rates while saving money by operating more efficiently,” Babcoke said.