Wamego Based Bellwethr Announces $2.5M Seed Funding

Bellwethr, a machine learning-powered customer conversion, and retention platform, has just announced a $2.5 million seed funding round. Matt Moody, founder of Bellwethr, lives and works from Wamego.

The financing comes at a pivotal time for the enterprise software company, priming it for rapid growth. The seed round was led by Utah-based Royal Street Ventures, with participation from Greenway Capital, KCRise Fund, SaaS Venture Capital, Stout Street Capital, Beth Ellyn McClendon, Karen and Paul Fenaroli (Minerva Fund) amongst others.

Previously, Bellwethr had amassed $120,000 in funding, Moody revealed at the time the company was named one of Startland’s 2019 Kansas City Startups to Watch.

“This funding adds fuel to what we’ve been building as we race to automate conversion and retention processes. We’ve been able to find some high quality talent and the big thing now is to apply that, build out the product more and start selling even faster,” Moody said.

Bellwethr uses a form of machine learning known as reinforcement learning to help companies continuously decrease CAC (customer acquisition cost), increase conversion rates, and increase customer retention. While the technology can be applied to virtually any industry, the team is focused on B2C companies with monthly recurring revenue, such as SaaS platforms and subscription services.

The fresh round of funding will allow Bellwethr to bolster their engineering and sales teams while offering new products and services. One such product, Retention Engine, handles the cancelation of consumer accounts/subscriptions by resolving issues and offering alternatives to cancelation.

Bellwethr stands out from other AI-powered tools by focusing less on analytics and insights, and more actions and automation. Most machine learning tools provide valuable insights but rely on humans to take action. Bellwethr’s software identifies patterns in data and implements actions automatically.

The company’s goals go beyond capturing market share. Bellwethr’s larger mission is to democratize machine learning and AI, allowing humans to focus on creative tasks by taking care of implementation and orchestration automatically.

“Currently, machine learning-powered tools are restricted to large organizations with the significant resources,” said Moody, “We believe that for this technology to reach its full potential, it needs to be in the hands of anyone and everyone.”

Much of the Bellwethr’s current engineering talent has joined the company — dually located in Manhattan and Kansas City — from K-State, Moody explained. 

“It seems like the trend is, you know, after graduation to head towards Kansas City,” said Moody, who hails from the neighboring city of Wamego. “It’s a nice thing for us to be able to kind of handle the two. We can have people start with us and then if they decide they want to move, we’ve got the team in Kansas City as well.”

Since graduating from Techstars in 2018, Bellwethr has more than doubled its revenue.

About Bellwethr 
Bellwethr (Techstars 2018) is a machine learning-powered customer conversion and retention platform for B2C businesses. It helps companies deliver dynamic and personalized experiences to convert customers and increase customer retention.