Quote-to-revenue platform leader DealHub.io says it’s evolving its platform to cater to AI-native businesses after acquiring Subskribe, a leading subscription management platform, for an undisclosed price.
The deal will lead to a unified platform that combines the capabilities of the two products, aiming to transform the way AI-first companies manage their quote-to-revenue lifecycles. It’ll deliver advanced price optimization capabilities for AI service providers, as well as usage-based monetization and automated revenue recognition. All of this will be done in real-time, enabling greater visibility and control for revenue operations teams, the company said.
Monetizing AI services has proven to be a tricky business for many companies, because of the complexity of such offerings. The costs associated with AI usage can scale dramatically, yet the real-world benefit they provide to customers is often difficult to quantify. Moreover, it’s never easy to forecast the running costs of AI, which makes it challenging to align pricing with the value such services provide to end users.
DealHub wants to solve these headaches. It has already established itself as a major player in the quote-to-revenue operations, the sales and onboarding workstream that involves generating sales quotes, managing subscriptions, billing for orders and recognizing the revenue generated.
The company’s proprietary Configure Price Quote engine (CPQ) has become a vital tool for SaaS providers, helping them to streamline the complexity of their sales and billing operations, as well as enhance the accuracy of quote management, contract creation, and revenue generation.
As for Subskribe, a rival to DealHub in some ways, it is more focused on subscription management. It’s known for its AI-native features that automate the entire subscription process and provide comprehensive, AI-enabled analytics to predict customer behavior.
The focus on subscription management seems to be what caught the eye of DealHub Chief Executive Eyal Elbahary. “The Subskribe team helped pioneer subscription billing during their time at Zuora, and over the past five years it has engineered one of the most sophisticated billing and revenue solutions for the AI era,” he said.
As AI businesses are under pressure to adapt and embrace more flexible sales-led-growth and product-led-growth revenue models (SLG and PLG respectively) as well as consumption-based pricing, they need extremely accurate AI usage metering, flexible subscriptions and the ability to monitor and analyze all of these different revenue streams.
This seems to be the reasoning behind the acquisition. The combined platform will provide a unified solution for the entire revenue lifecycle, providing the ability to monetize AI products and services more flexibly at greater scales. With Subskribe’s AI automations, the combined platform will support accurate and instant quoting for subscriptions, milestones, usage rates, ramps, product bundles and various other revenue models.
In addition, DealHub is promising enterprise-grade reliability and accuracy with full compliance and audit trails, plus enhanced analytics in the shape of live annual recurring revenue, usage, churn and demand forecasts, according to the announcement released by the company.
“Integrating Subskribe’s innovation with DealHub’s industry-leading CPQ creates the most intelligent and adaptive platform for forward-thinking AI-driven enterprises,” Elbahary said.
