The Venture Codex

Participated · Series D · Nov 2021

Podium provides a platform that helps local businesses collect payments, manage consumer communications, and run personalized marketing campaigns. The company’s tools include text messaging, website chat, marketing campaigns, and payment transactions. Podium says it is helping thousands of local businesses facilitate millions of interactions with consumers. Led by co-founder and CEO Eric Rea, the company plans to use new funding to reach more local businesses worldwide. Podium intends to invest in building out its payments, communications, and marketing technology. The article reports a valuation of over $3 billion following the raise. Podium offers a messaging platform for small businesses and has expanded into payments to let customers accept transactions more quickly. The company reports payments transaction volume has been roughly twice its expectations and believes payments could become a material revenue stream alongside its SaaS business. Podium reached about $100M ARR around the end of 2019 after a history of rapid ARR growth (approximately $12M in 2017, $30M by end of 2017, $50M in late 2018). To help businesses during the COVID-19 downturn, Podium is rolling out a free tier called Podium Starter with a waitlist and a plan to make it available to local U.S. businesses. Leadership says messaging demand is well-suited to reduced face-to-face interactions, and payments likewise fit contact-averse customer behavior. The company has raised significant venture capital to date and is positioned with a larger cash runway following its latest financing. Podium is a customer communication platform launched in 2014 by Eric Rea and based in Lehi, Utah. Its platform supports customer messaging, reviews, webchat and customer feedback across channels customers actually use. The product has been adopted by nearly 20,000 businesses and drives over 4 million customer interactions per month. Podium has more than 300 employees and plans to add another 100 employees by the end of the year. The company intends to use new funding to further develop existing and future products and to expand into more international markets. Podium launched in 2014 to help offline businesses get a handle on online customer reviews by focusing on reviews from verified customers. The product targets local brick-and-mortar businesses receiving reviews on Yelp, Facebook and other sites and uses an algorithm to identify online review information. Podium reports roughly 10,000 businesses in its roster (about 80,000 individual customers) and says revenue increased 600% in the last year; it is on target to hit $30 million in annual revenue by the end of 2017. The company plans to use new funding to hire a lot of engineers to build a new customer interaction platform and pursue machine-learning goals. Planned capabilities include deeper at-scale discovery, making and confirming appointments, and other features to improve the customer experience. Podium was part of Y Combinator's winter 2016 batch.

Led · Seed · Nov 2013

Backdoor is a Los Angeles-based messaging app that lets users anonymously message and communicate with friends. Recipients can redeem clues to learn more about who is messaging them and try to deduce the sender's identity. The app was created and launched in July 2013 by 14-year-old Daniel Singer. Backdoor is available on the App Store. The company raised $200K in seed funding from ArpexCapital and intends to use the funds to expand the platform and add new innovations to the app.