B2B SaaS start-up consalio closes pre-seed round and wins top executives from Signavio as investors for its Advisor Spend Management solution.
Consalio is a Düsseldorf-based start-up that supports companies in keeping their external advisor costs under control. With help of intelligent reports, expenses for advisory services can be analyzed in real-time. The resulting transparency supports an optimized use of resources for advisory services and creates trust between clients and advisors. Consalio is already working with international corporations such as E.ON and Bauer Media Group to create more transparency about advisory costs and to automate processes. In the current financing round consalio receives prominent support from Nicolas Peters, co-founder and former CTO of Signavio, and Gerrit de Veer, SAP Signavio’s former SVP Sales MEE.
The role of advisor services in corporate and public sectors is continuously expanding. Digital transformation projects, the use of data analytics and artificial intelligence, ESG-regulations as well as the “new work” have increasingly caused companies to contract specialist expertise from outside in the past years. At the same time, the threat of a global recession will force companies to massively optimize their cost base in future. Consequently, as spending on advisory services increases, so will the need for cost control and transparency over a company’s advisor landscape.
This poses increasing challenges for the department heads and project managers in terms of cost control in the advisory area. The lacking connection between the advisors and the company’s internal systems means a high level of manual effort on the part of the client in order to keep an eye on cost overviews and accounting information for all advisory services. The start-up consalio is focusing on this problem and has developed an Advisor Spend Management solution that transmits data from the advisors directly to the clients’ department in real time. Digitizing currently manual processes of data transfer, evaluation and approval result in significant time savings. But even more important, the resulting transparency enables cost-optimized project management.
The need for consalio’s solution exists in almost all business areas where external services are contracted: Legal departments, tax departments as well as IT and marketing departments typically employ a large network of advisors on an ongoing basis. “Our customers want to focus on what matters and use consalio to digitize processes and enable optimized management of advisor services”, says Felicia Mundhenke, founder of consalio.
In the current financing round, the start-up founded in Düsseldorf in 2021 receives prominent support from investors Nicolas Peters and Gerrit de Veer, both top executives of Signavio. Signavio is one of Germany’s most successful B2B SaaS start-ups in the field of “business process mining”, i.e. the optimization of business processes, and was acquired by SAP last year. Other investors in consalio include Alexander Bruehl (SaaSgarage), Anja Witte, Philipp Moehring, Marcus Bez, Mike G. Simon, Oliver Markl and Peter Kessler, as well as NRW.BANK from Düsseldorf. With the investment from the current round of funding, the start-up team will focus on developing the beta version, marketing and building the customer base in the coming months.