Introducing Variabl
Our latest investment out of ASV III.
At Armory, we take pride in backing founders who have lived inside a broken industry long enough to know exactly what it would take to fix it. Today, we’re delighted to announce that we co-led a Seed round in Variabl (formerly known as ZenCentiv), an AI-native platform built to reimagine Incentive Compensation Management (ICM), one of enterprise software’s most mission-critical, and most structurally dysfunctional, categories.
Every company with a sales team runs on incentive compensation. The math sounds simple: quota, attainment, payout. In practice, it is anything but. Layer in tiered accelerators, split territories, multi-product overlays, clawback provisions, and mid-year plan changes, and you have a system of interlocking edge cases that defies clean software logic. Legacy platforms like Callidus, Xactly, and Spiff addressed this by letting customers custom-code every plan — which meant every implementation became a bespoke tangle of rules that only a specialist consultant could maintain. Change a quota structure mid-cycle? That’s a statement of work. Add a territory split? Cross your fingers that nothing breaks downstream.
The result is an industry where customers spend $3 on consultants for every $1 on software, implementations routinely drag past six months, and finance teams grit their teeth while spending their entire month-end performing manual retroactive corrections (what the industry calls “Prior Period Adjustments”) just to keep the numbers right.
Software is supposed to eliminate this complexity. Instead, it has too often become the source of it.
Tom Rogers (CEO) saw this dynamic up close as the #1 performer at Spiff, where he was responsible for ~25% of ARR leading up to its Salesforce acquisition but watched firsthand as customers outgrew the platform’s architecture. He teamed up with Alex Kulik (President/COO), who dreamt up Variabl as a solution to his own problem after spending his career on the other side of the table, managing large-scale comp systems at companies like Tesla, Workday, and Informatica. Oxana Jurosevic (CPO) served as VP of Product at Spiff and Director of Product at Salesforce, overseeing enterprise ICM deployments at companies like Amazon and Google.
Why We Invested
Where incumbents offer infinite configurability, effectively outsourcing complexity to consultants, Variabl replaces custom logic with a reusable library of 1,100+ pre-built compensation plan templates. This is an opinionated system, and deliberately so: it trades theoretical flexibility for a codified, compounding knowledge base that captures how real enterprises actually structure compensation. Every implementation trains the system, every edge case is integrated, and the library becomes more valuable with scale in a way that a horizontally-architected competitor cannot replicate.
The downstream effects are dramatic. Variabl’s median implementation time is 2–4 weeks, against an industry average of 4–5 months. One customer migrated to Variabl in a fortnight after having squandered eleven months trying to go live on a legacy tool. Retroactive corrections that once required hours of manual intervention are detected and applied automatically, with a full audit trail. And because compensation logic is encoded as structured, machine-interpretable data from the ground up, AI has something real to work with: administrators can surface plan discrepancies before they compound, and reps can get an accurate, plain-English explanation of any payout change, which builds trust between sales orgs and finance teams.
The broader sales performance management market exceeds $3 billion globally, with clear expansion potential into adjacent finance and RevOps workflows as the template library scales. But the more immediate opportunity is simpler: there are a lot of comp teams still running on spreadsheets and consultant invoices, waiting for a system that actually works.
Variabl is that system. We’re proud to back the team building it.