Why We Founded Logik.io and The Road Ahead

Today is a massive milestone for Logik.io- we announced our Seed Funding round of over $10 million led by High Alpha and Salesforce Ventures to bring the next generation of configuration technology to market. You can read more about the funding here, but it’s worth diving deeper into exactly why we decided to create this business, and what we hope to achieve.  

Why did we found Logik.io?

Over 20 years ago, I founded BigMachines with Godard Abel (CEO of G2 and our Executive Chairman at Logik.io).  In 2010 BigMachines began to emerge as one of the early leaders of the CPQ category.  Prior to BigMachines, Godard and I studied Mechanical Engineering together at MIT.  The environment of innovation at MIT gave both of us the entrepreneurial bug early in life as we learned more about the complex machines, systems, and technology that ultimately makes companies successful.   

Eventually we sold BigMachines to Oracle in 2013, where it became Oracle CPQ.  I stayed at Oracle for several years growing that business.  Godard went on to build another leader in the CPQ space, Steelbrick, which was later acquired by Salesforce, and is now known as Salesforce Revenue Cloud. 

Over the span of two decades building and scaling these companies, we maintained a motto of“Customer Success Equals Our Success” (something we maintain today at Logik.io).  I am proud that BigMachines eventually grew to have hundreds of customers, many of which had my personal cell phone number.  With this intense focus on customer success we learned a lot about the CPQ space and ultimately what combination of people and technology brings the most value to companies that sell a variety of products and services.

When we founded Logik.io earlier this year we knew the world did not need another entirely new CPQ tool, but we realized that several gaps still existed in this industry:

1. 1. No solution on the market could handle moderate to high configuration complexity without difficult and costly administration and/or poor performance
   2. More and more businesses were looking to enable self-service eCommerce selling for their products and services, but a headless configuration option did not exist 

We saw this as an opportunity to build a new business enabling companies across many industries to sell more, sell faster, and maintain less. 

To make this vision a reality, we’ve assembled a founding team with over 100 years of combined experience in the CPQ space to bring a next generation headless configuration solution to market.

What is Logik.io and what makes us uniquely able to fill the gaps we saw in the market? 

Logik.io at its core is a next generation configuration engine that enhances and augments the capabilities of Salesforce CPQ and eCommerce applications by providing an advanced configuration engine, purpose built for speed, streamlined administration, and enhanced sales productivity.  

Based on the gaps we saw in the market, we’ve built Logik.io with two initial primary use cases in mind: 

1. 1. Complement and Augment Salesforce CPQ: Enhance Salesforce CPQ with a configuration solution that enables complex configuration while maintaining superior performance and easy maintenance all while leveraging the data model and components of Salesforce CPQ.  
   2. Configuration for B2B eCommerce Self-Serve: Provide a headless configuration engine that empowers businesses to build configuration once and use it everywhere. Logik.io enables businesses to build one unified configurator that can be used to power configuration experiences across all channels, including eCommerce, leveraging any user experience.  

With our wealth of experience in building CPQ solutions, we now have the opportunity to wipe the slate clean, and do all of the things we’ve always wanted to do from scratch- building the features and capabilities and architecture we know will provide the best experience for customers, including: 

1. 1. Proprietary Solving Engine: enabling lightning fast performance and complex configurations with tens of thousands of options and rules
   2. Simple yet Powerful Administration: CPQ admin was never easy.  We wanted to build an admin that would make admins lives easier, yet handle even more complexity
   3. Bill of Materials Engine: operating behind the scenes during configuration, Logik.io builds a manufacturing bill of materials (and routings) that can be easily sent to your ERP system
   4. Headless Operation: headless operation gives businesses flexibility.  Build once, and use Logik.io’s configuration engine everywhere.  

The Road Ahead

While the funding we announced today is an exciting milestone, it’s just the beginning of the journey for us.  

We currently have about 20 employees, and we’re growing quickly.  We will use this funding to further grow our engineering, support, partner enablement, and customer success teams.  

One of my favorite parts of working at BigMachines and Oracle was working directly with our customers and helping them solve their problems.  Our next big company milestone is to add 100 happy customers, and I can’t wait to get started.  Please send me an email at chris@logik.io if you are interested in learning more about how Logik.io can help you sell more, sell it faster, and reduce your maintenance costs.