Overview

Natero was a B2B SaaS customer success platform founded in May 2012 by Craig Soules and Garth Goodson in Mountain View, California. The company built software that ingested granular product usage data from SaaS vendors, integrated it with CRM, support, and billing systems, and applied machine learning to predict customer churn and identify expansion opportunities. Natero participated in Y Combinator's Summer 2012 batch and raised a total of $3.42 million across two rounds before being acquired by Freshworks in May 2019.^[1]

Natero was not a failure in the conventional sense — it achieved product-market fit, generated enough revenue to fund its own expansion after 2014, and was acquired by a strategic buyer. The constraint was structural: in a winner-take-most category where primary competitor Gainsight raised over $100 million in venture capital, Natero's $3.42 million total raise left it unable to compete on distribution, brand, or integrations at scale. The acquisition by Freshworks was the rational terminal outcome for a technically differentiated product that was more valuable inside a larger CRM suite than as a standalone subscription.

Freshworks acquired Natero on May 21, 2019, rebranding the technology as Freshsuccess and integrating it into the Freshworks 360 suite. Both founders transitioned to Freshworks roles before departing in 2023 to co-found Springtail, a scale-out replicated database startup — returning to the infrastructure roots that preceded Natero.^[2]

Founding Story

Craig Soules and Garth Goodson brought an unusual profile to a customer success startup: both held PhDs from Carnegie Mellon University and had spent the preceding decade building enterprise infrastructure at scale.^[3]

Soules spent six years at HP Labs leading R&D on a distributed database system. Goodson spent eight years at NetApp as a founding member of the Advanced Technology Group within the CTO's Office.^[4] Neither had a background in sales, customer success, or SaaS go-to-market — a fact that would shape both the company's product strengths and its eventual limitations.

The founding insight came from Soules's time at HP. He observed a persistent gap between the data processing tools available to engineers — powerful, flexible, but requiring deep technical expertise — and the tools available to business users, who needed actionable insights and readable charts rather than raw database access.^[5] The problem was not a lack of data; it was a lack of infrastructure to translate data into decisions for non-technical operators.

Soules later described the founding aim directly: "I co-founded Natero in 2012 with the aim of making companies more data-driven. That ultimately led to the launch of Natero's customer success platform in late 2015 and its eventual acquisition by Freshworks in 2019."^[6]

The path to customer success was not immediate. Before settling on B2B SaaS, Soules investigated eCommerce and the Internet of Things as potential verticals for the same underlying data-translation thesis.^[7] This deliberate market search — testing the thesis across multiple domains before committing — suggests disciplined validation rather than trend-chasing. The SaaS customer success category was chosen because it offered a clear, measurable outcome (churn reduction), a data-rich environment (product usage logs), and a customer base (SaaS companies) that was already predisposed to data-driven decision-making.