Company Intro
Olive takes the best practices of digital transformation used by IT consultants, CIOs, Analysts, and Technology buyers and streamlines the process in an online platform. Built to be the olive branch between buyers and sellers of technology, the Olive platform is the first end to end vendor selection software built to help businesses use their specific needs to find the best-fit technology solutions from the entire market. Put simply, purchasing technology without Olive is like selling technology without a CRM.
While many companies have attempted to solve this problem in different ways, Olive is the first company to normalize business’ needs so they can be reused by other buyers for the evaluation of solutions. This ability to search for technologies based on your specific business requirements puts Olive in a unique place when compared to the likes of analysts (e.g. Gartner), consultants (e.g. Accenture), and review engines (e.g. Capterra).
Traction
After launching the first version of Olive in late 2019, companies such as A&W, the University of Alberta, Zamil corporation, Freddy’s, and the federal government have all become customers. Olive continues to grow at 40% month over month. Their biggest hurdle is normalizing a repeatable sales process to generate truly predictable revenue.
Team
Chris Heard – CEO & Co-founder. A career enterprise sales leader, Chris decided to switch over to help enable buyers the way Salesforce et al. have helped sales teams. Seeing the bias and inefficiencies in the buying process, Chris knew that software could help bring equilibrium to the market.
Dan Harrison – CTO & Co-Founder. Computer Science graduate and former Sales Engineer Dan Harrison always wanted to be of service to others and drive the creation of something that brought value to people. In building Olive with Chris, whom he met at Vancouver tech start-up Mobify, he is fulfilling this goal.
Funding
Olive was self-funded until the Summer of 2020 and just closed out a seed round, using that capital to build up both the engineering and sales teams. They have now taken on a total of $1.3M from funds such as Active Capital, Novator, and Techstars Ventures.
Revenue Model
Olive is a B2B SaaS business and its revenue model is fairly straightforward; buyers subscribe to Olive monthly for access to the platform. Olive has flexible plans ranging from Individual to Consultant to Enterprise.