Minoa, a San Francisco startup building software that helps business-to-business sales teams track and prove customer return on investment, announced September 9 it closed a $6.2 million seed round led by Storm Ventures. Mintaka VC, 468 Capital, AirAngels and GTM Operators Network participated in the financing, bringing the company's total raised to $8.9 million since Max Elster and Richard Einhorn founded it in 2023.
The company declined to disclose its valuation.
Minoa's pitch arrives at a moment when procurement departments have tightened their grip on software budgets. Gartner reported in May that 69 percent of buyers now rely on sales representatives to validate AI-generated product insights, while a January study from Forrester found that intensifying budget scrutiny is forcing companies to justify expenditures line by line. The shift has created an opening for tools that promise to make value tangible before contracts get signed.
The startup describes itself as "the value intelligence layer," pulling customer-value data into what it calls a governed model that stretches from initial sales call through post-sale outcomes. The platform connects to Salesforce and HubSpot on the customer-relationship-management side, links to data warehouses including Snowflake, BigQuery and Databricks, and integrates with AI agents such as Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini through its Model Context Protocol server.
Snowflake is onboarding 3,000 sellers onto the platform, Minoa said. Vanta, a security-compliance vendor, builds business cases roughly 80 percent faster using the software, according to the company. Other customers include Ironclad, Cognite, Personio, Pendo, Benchling and Ashby.
David Somers, the Storm Ventures partner who led the round, said the technical foundation caught his attention more than the user-facing features. "What convinced me wasn't the workflows," he explained. "It was the architecture underneath them." Somers previously served as chief product officer at Workday before joining Storm, which invests in early-stage B2B companies.
The startup said it will use the capital to expand what it calls the "Value Graph," a data layer designed to link initial purchase rationale to measurable outcomes and surface that context for both employees and AI agents. "Customer value has never had its own data infrastructure," Einhorn, the chief technology officer, said.
Elster framed the company's ambition in sweeping terms. "We want every company in the world to have the infrastructure to articulate, measure, and prove the value it creates for customers."
Minoa raised a $2.7 million pre-seed round in May 2023 led by 468 Capital, with backing from Mischief (an investment vehicle associated with Plaid co-founder Zach Perret), AirAngels (an Airbnb alumni syndicate), Alumni Ventures and Fidi Ventures, according to a release at the time. Angel investors included Mathilde Collin, co-founder of Front, and Russ Heddleston, co-founder of DocSend. The company now employs between 11 and 50 people, according to its LinkedIn page.
The startup operates in a market often labeled customer value management or value selling tools. Mediafly offers a Value360 platform. Ecosystems.io has raised growth capital from Gauge Capital, according to a LinkedIn post from an Ecosystems executive. Cuvama, which describes itself as an "AI-native discovery and value case platform," raised seed funding in 2024. ValueCore, formerly known as VisualizeROI, and Symbe, a business-case generator targeting HubSpot users, also compete in the space.
DecisionLink, an early entrant in customer-value management, was acquired by XFactor.io in April 2023.
Minoa published research in July 2026 on buyer behavior that analyzed 818 closed deals. Win rates climbed from 39 percent to 53 percent when two buyer-side stakeholders opened the business case instead of one, the research found. The company said the findings drew from a broader dataset encompassing roughly one million opportunities.
Pendo highlighted new integrations with Minoa at its Pendomonium conference in March, according to a company blog post. Vanta reported more than 16,000 customers and $300 million in annual recurring revenue as of late April, Fortune reported April 29.
"The best companies of the future will put customer value at the center of how they operate," Elster said.
Whether that vision translates into a durable category remains to be seen. But for now, Minoa has convinced investors that the infrastructure for proving value deserves its own software layer.
