Chargebee, the Chennai- and San Francisco-based subscription billing and revenue management platform, announced its acquisition of Trainn on March 28, 2025. This acquisition marks a strategic move in the SaaS space, as Chargebee aims to bolster its customer onboarding and education capabilities through Trainn’s AI-first video training and enablement tools.
This deal strengthens Chargebee’s long-term product vision. By integrating Trainn, the company will embed intelligent customer training modules directly into its platform. With this move, Chargebee shows a clear commitment to enhancing customer experience, retention, and self-service across global markets.
Understanding the Deal
Chargebee did not disclose the acquisition price, but sources close to the deal confirmed that the transaction involved a mix of cash and stock. Chargebee’s leadership began discussions with Trainn in late 2024. Both companies shared cultural synergy, a customer-first approach, and deep technical alignment.
Trainn, a SaaS startup co-founded by Chargebee alumni, built a powerful platform for product education. It enables companies to create automated video walkthroughs, interactive tutorials, and intelligent onboarding journeys for customers. The team designed it to reduce manual training efforts and boost product adoption using AI.
With this acquisition, Chargebee gains not just software IP but also a seasoned product team and a loyal user base. Trainn’s founders and core engineering team will join Chargebee, where they will continue developing the unified product experience under Chargebee’s customer success division.
Chargebee’s Broader Strategy
Chargebee has steadily expanded beyond billing. In recent years, it introduced solutions for revenue recognition, customer retention, pricing experimentation, and usage-based billing. However, customer enablement remained a missing piece in its platform suite.
Many Chargebee customers—especially in fast-moving B2B SaaS environments—struggled with client onboarding and training. Sales closed quickly, but end-users often failed to understand key features, leading to low engagement and increased churn.
Chargebee’s product team saw this friction as an opportunity. By embedding onboarding and training workflows into the billing and account lifecycle, they planned to create a seamless customer journey. Trainn offered the ideal solution to fill this gap.
Krish Subramanian, CEO and co-founder of Chargebee, shared his thoughts. “We’ve focused deeply on product-led growth for the past few years. With Trainn, we can now ensure that customers experience value from day one. Our support teams can scale better, our onboarding becomes proactive, and our retention strengthens.”
The Power of AI in Customer Enablement
Trainn built its platform around AI from the beginning. The tool automatically generates video walkthroughs based on screen recordings, product metadata, and user behavior. It also personalizes tutorials for each customer based on their plan, usage history, and business goals.
This AI-first approach helped Trainn stand out in a crowded space. Traditional onboarding required time-consuming coordination between customer success managers, designers, and product trainers. Trainn eliminated that complexity. Within minutes, businesses could create customized, scalable enablement flows that felt human-led.
Chargebee now plans to integrate this functionality into its dashboard. Account admins will soon gain the ability to configure onboarding journeys for their own end-users without leaving the Chargebee interface. This move will reduce ticket volumes, shorten time-to-value, and increase product stickiness.
Subramanian emphasized this benefit during the announcement: “SaaS today moves fast. Customers expect self-serve everything. With Trainn, we meet that expectation and empower our clients to meet it too—for their own customers.”
Trainn’s Journey to Acquisition
Trainn launched in 2021 as a remote-first startup. Its three co-founders—Sandeep Reddy, Haritha J, and Karthik Rajendran—previously worked at Chargebee in engineering and product roles. They witnessed firsthand the challenges customers faced post-sale, especially with complex product adoption.
They envisioned a better solution—one where product teams could deliver contextual onboarding at scale, powered by AI. Over the next four years, the team built Trainn from the ground up. They bootstrapped initially and later raised a small seed round from early-stage investors.
By 2024, Trainn had attracted over 500 customers, including mid-market and enterprise SaaS companies in the U.S., Europe, and Southeast Asia. Customers praised its intuitive UX, automation capabilities, and deep integration with CRMs and help desks.
Chargebee noticed Trainn’s momentum early. Leadership teams stayed in touch, exchanging ideas and product feedback. When Trainn started exploring strategic partnerships in late 2024, Chargebee stepped forward with an acquisition proposal.
The founders described the process as “natural.” They trusted Chargebee’s vision, valued its culture, and saw the move as an opportunity to scale their impact faster.
The Growing Importance of Customer Education
Customer education has become a top priority for SaaS companies in 2025. As products grow more sophisticated and self-serve models dominate, businesses must guide users through complex setups and workflows without high-touch support.
Poor onboarding leads to lower activation rates, increased churn, and underwhelming customer satisfaction. Even the best product loses value if users don’t understand how to use it.
Chargebee recognized this pain point across its customer base. Many of its clients operate in industries like fintech, healthtech, and e-learning, where products require compliance training, data configuration, or role-based user access. Trainn’s AI-powered approach addresses these challenges with speed and personalization.
With this acquisition, Chargebee gains a competitive edge. While rivals like Zuora and Paddle continue to focus on billing and pricing, Chargebee expands into customer success and lifecycle enablement.
What Customers Can Expect
Chargebee will begin rolling out Trainn’s functionality in Q2 2025. In the first phase, customers will access plug-and-play onboarding templates. Later updates will include:
- AI-generated tutorials based on user roles and usage data
- Embedded product walkthroughs inside Chargebee’s dashboard
- Interactive feature tips that adapt in real-time
- Integration with CRM systems to track engagement metrics
- Onboarding analytics for customer success teams
Chargebee will offer these features under a new product tier called Chargebee Onboard. Early access will open to select customers in April, followed by a full release in July.
Support teams, product managers, and CSMs stand to benefit the most. With fewer onboarding calls and support tickets, they can shift their focus to strategic conversations and long-term value realization.
Team Integration and Future Plans
Trainn’s 25-member team will join Chargebee’s Chennai and Bengaluru offices. The founders will lead a new product group dedicated to customer enablement. This group will also collaborate with Chargebee’s analytics and AI divisions to enhance personalization capabilities across the platform.
Chargebee does not plan to sunset Trainn’s standalone product immediately. Instead, the company will support existing Trainn customers while building migration paths to the integrated platform. Over time, the standalone version may transition to a lighter freemium model under the Chargebee brand.
This approach mirrors Chargebee’s earlier integration strategies following its acquisitions of RevLock (revenue recognition) and Brightback (churn analytics).
Final Thoughts
Chargebee’s acquisition of Trainn sends a clear message: customer experience matters just as much as revenue operations. In a crowded SaaS market, onboarding and product education no longer remain optional—they drive retention, growth, and brand loyalty.
With Trainn’s AI-powered training platform in its toolkit, Chargebee steps into a new phase of product evolution. It now offers not just revenue infrastructure—but full-cycle customer success infrastructure.
The companies share a common origin, a shared purpose, and a customer-first mindset. Together, they aim to redefine how subscription businesses onboard, educate, and grow their users.
Chargebee just made one thing very clear: intelligent onboarding isn’t a luxury—it’s the new standard.