battery ventures

Coefficient wants to bring live data into your existing spreadsheets • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in analytics, Apps, battery ventures, business intelligence, Coefficient, Enterprise, startup, StartupsNo Comments

With the explosive adoption of software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps, the average company now has more than 100 SaaS apps to manage — leading to data being siloed across countless different systems. That makes analysis challenging. To wit, according to Forrester, between 60% and 73% of all data within an enterprise goes unused for analytics. Ideally, analysts need something that connects disparate enterprise systems, like business intelligence and analytics tools. But these tools are often complex and unintuitive, leading employees to spend hours each day searching and gathering information. In search of an answer, Navneet Loiwal teamed up with Tommy Tsai, with whom he’d previously founded an e-commerce app, to build Coefficient, an app that brings live data into Google Sheets and other existing spreadsheet platforms. “Tsai and I had worked on consumer technologies for many years, and we saw a big opportunity to bring consumer-grade experiences to companies,” Loiwal told ZebethMedia in an email interview. Loiwal was previously a software developer at Google working on AdWords, while Tsai was an early engineer at location-sharing smartphone app Loopt. “Most data products are designed for the technical user, which results in a poor user experience and low adoption for business users. We wanted to bring the power of technical products to the business user with the simplicity that they expect in their consumer lives.” To this end, Coefficient — which today closed an $18 million Series A funding round — is designed to cut down on the number of manual and repetitive tasks business users have to complete daily to cross-reference data across systems. The platform lays on top of Google Sheets (with support for Excel forthcoming), bringing in data from customer relationship management (CRMs) systems, SQL databases and other SaaS tools. Using Coefficient, users can create, share and automate live reports, set up alerts and write data back to connected SaaS tools. A template gallery provides pre-made spreadsheet dashboards for common reports used by business operations teams (think team KPIs, leadership dashboards and decks and revenue analyses), which users can integrate with existing data systems to enable live data to power all charts within their spreadsheets. Coefficient’s spreadsheet add-on. Image Credits: Coefficient “Business users are more technical in the spreadsheet than anywhere else, yet business teams are often forced to resort to archaic methods of managing data — requesting frequent updates from technical teams with data expertise or exporting raw data from dashboards or CRMs to report repeat, manual analysis, reducing team efficiency and productivity,” Loiwal said. “Coefficient’s products extend the reach of advanced, connected data and analytics to business users, enabling the business to become more self-sufficient through real-time connectivity to the data in their source systems from where they’re working: in spreadsheets.” That’s a lot to promise. And to be sure, Coefficient isn’t the first to attempt this sort of thing. Startups like Airtable and Smartsheet already offer spreadsheet-like UIs to organize business data. Others have tried to put their own spins on the formula, like spreadsheets with apps and spreadsheets with granular access controls. Indeed, at first glance, Coefficient sounds a lot like Actiondesk, which similarly connects with databases, CRMs and SaaS tools to feed live data into Excel and Google Sheets spreadsheets. Like Coefficient, Actiondesk supports common formulas and offers templates for getting started. But to its credit, Coefficient got off to an auspicious start — Loiwal claims that Zendesk, Spotify, Foursquare, Contentful and Miro are among its customers. Combined, tens of thousands of people are currently using the platform. “We are seeing our customers grow their contracts with us despite undergoing layoffs — a testament to the value proposition of making business teams more efficient,” Loiwal said. “Additionally, with increased remote work and complex economic headwinds, companies need their employees to become more self-sufficient.” Loiwal says that the proceeds from the Series A will be put toward expanding Coefficient’s product offerings and “scaling global operations.” In the coming months, the startup plans to add new SaaS system integrations and expand the scope of its reporting automation tools. Battery Ventures led Coefficient’s Series A with participation from Foundation Capital and S28 Capital. To date, the company has raised $24.7 million in capital. Neeraj Agrawal, a general partner at Battery Ventures, added: “It is a testament to the Coefficient team’s product craftsmanship that users become evangelists, promoting use of the product throughout the organization … Coefficient products equip business users with the tools and automation needed to reach peak performance, a critical advantage amid an unpredictable macroeconomic environment.”

Unicorns face 5-1 odds as they wait for public markets to warm • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in battery ventures, cloud, EC Cloud and Enterprise Infrastructure, EC Newsletter, EC venture capital, Enterprise, Startups, VentureNo Comments

Earlier today, The Exchange dug into changing investor sentiment regarding growth and profitability. A new report looking at cloud and software companies from Battery Ventures ran the math on how investors are rewarding faster growth from less unprofitable companies — dare we say, profitable companies? — with the data indicating that, at least for now, growth is no longer enough to maximize corporate value. For startups busy stacking new revenue with minimal burn, the situation is good news. For companies that raised while money was cheap — and sitting on huge valuations predicated on yesteryear’s valuations — the news that profitability is in vogue again is far from welcome. Many unicorns are likely now trapped between changing investor preferences and a general compression of the value of software companies. Why? Because many a unicorn was minted during the 2020-2021 era on the back of quick revenue growth more than anything else. And, as revenue multiples stretched to the sky during that time period, a great number of startups reached the $1 billion valuation threshold — or a multiple thereof — on the back of small, if quickly expanding, top line. If revenue multiples have come down, that’s bad news for unicorns. If revenue multiples have come down and growth is losing comparative luster to profits, high-burn unicorns that were once valued more for something else are doubly bound by changing market conditions. Even worse, Battery points out a few difficult facts about just how many unicorns might be able to go public in the coming years compared to how many unicorns there are in the market today. There’s a lining of good news in the data for truly standout startups. But for the bog-standard unicorn, there’s more than just storm clouds on the horizon. Why is the math bad? In the last 10 years, Battery counts 200 software companies that went public. In contrast, the venture firm counts more than 1,000 new unicorns minted over the same time frame. That’s a 5-1 ratio of IPOs to new billion-dollar companies.

Are investors really paying more for profits than growth today? • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in battery ventures, cloud, EC Cloud and Enterprise Infrastructure, EC Newsletter, EC venture capital, Enterprise, Startups, The Exchange, VentureNo Comments

What’s better: growing quickly or making lots of money? The answer, in startup terms, is both. But because there is a natural tension between growth (which usually comes with incremental costs, often in advance of new revenues) and profitability (allowing revenue to further extend its coverage of operating costs), most startups lean more on the growth side of the equation. It’s not hard to understand why. Venture investors provide capital that often greatly exceeds a startup’s revenue base, allowing the company to hire and market aggressively — and build, we hasten to add — in hopes of far-larger future scale at the cost of near-term profitability. The tradeoff between growth and profitability is often detailed in the so-called Rule of 40. Indeed, the rubric that combines a growth metric (measured in year-over-year terms) and a profitability result (measured in percent-of-revenue terms) in hopes of the sum meeting or exceeding 40 has generated derivative metrics for companies of a particular age or segment. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on ZebethMedia+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday. Naturally, the Rule of 40 is not something that applies to, say, pre-revenue startups hoping to raise a pre-seed round. It’s a metric that applies to startups that are generating revenues at a sufficient scale to make the numbers reasonable; no one cares if you can meet the Rule of 40 while tripling your revenue from $1 to $3 per year, but if you are expanding your revenues from $1 million to $3 million per year, the rule is likely something you’ll be measured against. Now that venture markets are in retreat and public markets have been revalued, there’s been some push for startups to change their posture, trading some growth now for smaller deficits. A flight to quality, some call it. We’d call it a rebalancing away from quicker growth and staggering losses toward merely rapid growth and less cash burn. Battery Ventures recently dropped a new report (the “State of the OpenCloud 2022”) that includes some fascinating data on the profit/growth conversation. It’s something that we’ve touched on repeatedly here at ZebethMedia as both venture investors and their public-market cognates have shaken up their valuation models.

With $67M in new capital, NorthOne is doubling down on SMBs as some fintech companies pull back • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 13, 2022Posted in battery ventures, digital banking, Fintech, NorthOne, StartupsNo Comments

It’s common knowledge, especially to those who work in financial services, that the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically increased demand for digital banking globally. A flurry of fintechs emerged in hope of meeting that demand while incumbent banks clamored to step up their own digital games. And then there were those companies that existed well before the pandemic. New York-based NorthOne is one such example. Founded by Eytan Bensoussan and Justin Adler in 2016, the startup was born to serve small business owners such as barbers, mechanics and local restaurant owners. When the pandemic hit, there was perhaps no other category of businesses impacted as greatly as small businesses. Some didn’t survive but many pushed through, either pivoting or weathering the early days of the crisis by adapting their models accordingly. “Covid, despite all the terrible parts, pushed the education around digital banking – at least in our part of the world,” said CEO Bensoussan. Over the years, NorthOne has worked to offer more than banking services to its customers. It added products that would also help them simplify their financial operations “by connecting the data layer between accounting, receivables, payables, lending, payroll — all the financial operations — and the bank account ledger.” “As our customers grow, their problems evolve beyond the bank account,” Bensoussan said. In 2021, NorthOne replatformed the company with a new banking partner, The Bancorp Bank, N.A, an investment that it says has paid off. Over the last 12 months, Bensoussan said that NorthOne’s revenue grew “4-5x” while customer growth was “in line with revenue growth.” “We were built – by definition – to serve the smaller part of the small business market,” COO Adler added. “And that made us really capable of serving these folks in an efficient way, but also having a product offering that was just really tailored for what they specifically need.” To help fuel continued growth, the startup is announcing it has raised $67 million in a Series B funding round that included participation from Battery Ventures, Don Griffith, NFL player Drew Brees, Ferst Capital Partners, FinTLV, Next Play Capital, Operator Stack, Redpoint Ventures, Tencent and Tom Williams. The financing brings NorthOne’s fundraising total to $90.3 million since inception. The company declined to reveal valuation, saying only that it was an “up round” that closed in late summer. The funding comes at an interesting time in the world of fintech, considering that players such as Brex have actually shifted their focus away from small businesses – in part due to the risk associated with underwriting such ventures – to focus on enterprises. For NorthOne, that only means opportunity. “A lot of folks are moving really aggressively towards that top side of the market – like a Fortune 500 company or a VC backed startup, but the fact of the matter is that both of those markets are really niche,” said COO Adler. “We’ve actually really doubled down on our core customer base, which are businesses that you pass by on your way to work – like that cafe, or hair salon, or dry cleaner – that are just really underserved by traditional banks and increasingly also by fintechs and challenger banks.” Image Credits: Co-founders Eytan Bensoussan (CEO) and Justin Adler (COO) / NorthOne The majority of NorthOne’s customer base has less than 10 employees. The startup’s go-to-market strategy surprisingly relies less on the internet than one might expect. While the company, which does not yet have a sales team, does use the internet for leads, it also holds in-person event series in various cities around the country where it offers educational content to small business owners. It also partners with organizations such as Profit First, a group which offers financial management advice to small businesses. NorthOne, the founders said, works to give its customers access to its services in as many convenient ways as possible. For example, it takes cash deposits through a series of partnerships with companies such as Walmart, 7-11 and Office Max. “That’s important, as small businesses really do deal with cash – as much as we’d love to imagine that it’s all online,” Adler said. “The vast majority of America’s businesses are still using these types of money movement and we need to go to them.” Battery Ventures led NorthOne’s $21 million Series A in March of 2020 and is doubling down on its investment with the new raise. Partner Shiran Shalev says he was drawn to the company’s laser focus on the SMB market. “There’s so much focus in the fintech world on serving tech companies and serving large enterprises, that someone’s going after Main Street and that size of business, is just such a large opportunity,” he told ZebethMedia in an interview. Having spent time in Israel and Europe, where fintech was more developed, Shalev says he “spent a lot of time looking at all the different options in this space” in the United States. “We’re very, very intrigued by what NorthOne has built,” he added. Ultimately, the company’s goal is to give its business the “control, clarity and confidence” they need to better manage their finances. It plans to use its new capital to build out the software layer of its business as well as create new financial products for its customers such as payments rails to working capital and credit offerings. Presently, NorthOne has about 75 employees and doesn’t plan to go on a hiring spree with its new capital. “We’ll be adding programmatically as we bring on these new software layers and these new products,” Bensoussan said. My weekly fintech newsletter, The Interchange, launched on May 1! Sign up here to get it in your inbox.