felicis

MadKudu lands $18M led by Felicis for its lead scoring platform • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in felicis, product-led growth, Venture, venture capitalNo Comments

It’s hard to get ahead when you’re just trying to stay afloat. But startups weathering the downturn with fewer employees and a smaller budget are finding ways to survive and move forward by relying on a 15-year-old twist on software adoption called “bottoms-up” SaaS. The idea, dating back to the enterprise social network Yammer, is that new software tools can find their way into a company by landing first in the hands of employees. In a financial downturn especially, the model is attractive because it doesn’t rely on a massive (expensive) salesforce but rather a groundswell of interest. Yammer, a kind of social network for enterprises, kicked off the wave when it was founded in 2008. Something similar is happening now, though the wave has been renamed “product-led growth” or PLG, and one startup that fits the mold is MadKudu, an eight-year-old, Paris- and New York-based company behind a customer data platform product. Founded by Sam Levan and Francis Brero, who met at a since-acquired predictive marketing platform, they realized more data science was needed to help sales reps sift through thousands of product users to identify who is ready to buy. According to the company, Levan was able to show soon after that growth teams could double their free-to-paid conversion rate within weeks and got to work on developing tech that would give other organizations “data science superpowers” to discover revenue opportunities, including those with severely limited engineering resources, which, these days, is a lot of startups. Asked for metrics in an interview with ZebethMedia last week, Levan declined to share anything concrete but said that MadKudu has been growing its numbers by “5x over the last 12 months.” He also mentioned a lot of customers whose brands readers will recognize, including Dropbox, Cloudera, Amplitude, Plain, Unity, and Miro. Levan also said the traction the company is seeing led to a flurry of term sheets recently that resulted in a new $18 million Series A round that the early-stage firm Felicis led, joined by BGV, Alven, Techstars, and numerous individual investors. (The company has now raised $27 million altogether.) Niki Pezeshki, a general partner at Felicis who led the deal, meanwhile suggested that he would have been remiss not to notice MadKudu. “I think in the span of a week or two, we had two separate board meetings where the go-to-market head or the CRO said that they had just implemented MadKudu and that it was making a really, really positive change for their go-to-market strategy, especially around PLG. And when you hear that from two different members of high-performing companies, you definitely take notice.” Indeed, for now, MadKudu remains very focused on lead scoring that helps salespeople understand which leads are valuable and which would be a waste of time to chase. Levan claims that by analyzing the product usage data of its customers to find patterns in their users’ activity, MadKudu now has the “largest PLG data set in the world.” Going forward, Levan said last week, the idea is to use its fresh capital to triple its 35-person team by next year — including to beef up on customer success and support staff — and to invest more time and attention into improving the user experience. That includes spending time on creating educational programs that can help market leaders better understand what PLG is all about and how to fully realize the potential of MadKudu’s product specifically. “We already have the best technology out there,” said Levan, without sounding completely obnoxious. Now he just wants more people to use it. Pictured above, from left to right, MadKudu founders Sam Levan and Francis Brero.

Meilisearch lands $15M investment to grow its ‘search-as-a-service’ business • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 10, 2022Posted in Apps, felicis, Meilisearch, Search, StartupsNo Comments

Meilisearch, the creator behind the open source search engine project of the same name, today closed a $15 million Series A round led by Felicis, with participation from CRV, LocalGlobe, ESOP, Mango Capital, Seedcamp and Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch. CEO Quentin de Quelen tells ZebethMedia that the new cash will help to expand Paris-based Meilisearch’s marketing and sales teams as the company transitions to an “enterprise-focused” strategy. “For three years, we have created a product that brings a lot of value to developers, which has allowed us to form a strong community,” Quelen said via email. “The new money is to focus on the development of Meilisearch Cloud, our fully managed offering of Meilisearch instances. We will also continue to invest in our open source offering by releasing an ‘enterprise-ready’ version of Meilisearch by the beginning of 2023.” Quelen co-founded Meilisearch alongside Clément Renault and Thomas Payet, two friends from college, in 2018. The trio worked together on search tech at e-commerce startup Veepee and then at Louis Vuitton, where they quickly realized the intractable problem that building a search engine presented. “Building great search experiences has historically only been possible for companies with large tech resources,” Quelen said. “[Search is often] very hard and expensive for a team to maintain and tune.” In 2020, Quelen, Renault and Payet released Meilisearch, a search API based on their professional learnings and experiences. Available on GitHub, the project grew to over 10 million downloads, making it among the most popular open source search projects. Image Credits: Meilisearch Quelen asserts that, unlike Elasticsearch, and other freely available search engine frameworks, Meilisearch is designed for frontend applications across a broad swath of domains — not just narrow use cases like e-commerce discovery. Leveraging natural language processing, Meilisearch attempts to gain a better understanding of the queries that users make on whatever app, service or website a developer builds it into. Meilisearch supports major languages and ships with search filters, like price and date, as well as customizable ranking rules. It also corrects for typos and mistakes, ensuring errors in queries don’t adversely impact the search experience. Quelen claims that more than 10,000 apps today rely on Meilisearch. That’s impressive when considering the growing competition in the “search-as-a-service” space, which includes CommandBar, Algolia and Chameleon. “[W]e quickly proved that Meilisearch was long-awaited by developers who could not find simple and powerful solutions to improve the search experience in their applications,” he said. “The open source project shows a huge adoption from the developer community and [we’re] actively working on monetization around the open source project.” To that end, as Quelen alluded to, Meilisearch is upping its investment in Meilisearch Cloud, which is scheduled to launch in late November. In development over the past few months, Quelen says that Meilisearch Cloud — which offers the same experience as the open source Meilisearch but hosted on the public cloud, with prebuilt integrations — onboarded over 50 companies during a private beta. When asked about runway and revenue, Quelen declined to comment. But he said that Meilisearch will take a disciplined approach to burn, spending the capital it raised from the Series A over the course of the next two to three years. To date, Meilisearch has raised $22 million. It plans to expand its 25-person headcount to 30 by the end of the year and 50 by year-end 2023.