The Venture Codex

Participated · Series B · Nov 2023

Noon Academy is a Saudi online integrated learning platform that combines social and gamification features. The platform enables collaborative learning through study groups, peer participation, competitions, and interaction with teachers and classmates. Its product emphasizes engagement and social learning mechanics to support group-based study. The company recently completed a $41 million Series B financing. The round was co-led by Wa'ed Ventures and Raed Ventures, with participation from Nahlat Alarab Holding, Qyem Development Holding, Sanabil 500, Endeavor Catalyst, Riyadh Valley Company, STV, and Steadfast Venture Capital. No operating metrics or specific future plans were provided in the article.

Participated · Series F · Oct 2021

JumpCloud is an open directory platform that centralizes management of user identities and devices to enable secure, frictionless access from any device or location. The company’s mission is to Make Work Happen by providing simple, secure access to corporate technology resources and helping organizations adopt Zero Trust security models. JumpCloud targets small and midsize enterprises and is using the recent funding to accelerate SME adoption of its modern directory platform. The company reports a global user base of more than 120,000 organizations and over 5,000 paying customers, including Cars.com, GoFundMe, Grab, ClassPass, Uplight, Beyond Finance, and Foursquare. JumpCloud closed a $225 million Series F at a $2.625 billion valuation, and the financing brought total capital raised to over $400 million. The additional capital is positioned to support product adoption and go-to-market expansion for its directory platform. JumpCloud offers a cloud-native directory platform that centralizes identity and access functions — including device management, single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, privileged access management and identity governance — for SMBs and mid-market customers. The company targets organizations that lack large IT staffs by providing enterprise-grade features in an easy-to-deploy, cost-conscious product. CEO Rajat Bhargava frames the directory as the core of an IT organization and says the platform connects users and identities to the resources they need. JumpCloud reports it has 5,000 customers after adding 2,000 since the prior November, and had roughly 300 employees last November with plans to double head count by year-end. The company is not disclosing revenue metrics. With a sizable balance sheet from recent financings, leadership is open to strategic M&A to add engineering talent and product functionality, and is not currently focused on an IPO. JumpCloud offers the JumpCloud Directory Platform, a cloud-based solution that enables IT, security operations, and DevOps to control and manage employee identities, devices, and apply Zero Trust principles. The platform is designed to give people secure access to the resources they need to do their jobs. The company reports a global user base of more than 100,000 organizations across over 100 countries and over 3,000 customers, including Cars.com, GoFundMe, ClassPass, and Foursquare. JumpCloud completed its Series E growth round at $100M after adding $25M and has now raised nearly $200M in total. The company says it will use the Series E to expand product development, marketing, and sales globally. To support growing demand, JumpCloud added Kevin Biggs as Chief Revenue Officer. JumpCloud offers an independent cloud directory platform that connects people to devices, web applications and cloud resources across heterogeneous operating environments. The product includes a free tier for 10 users on 10 systems for an unlimited amount of time, and the company reports 100,000 users, about 3,000 of whom are paying. CEO Rajat Bhargava says the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated demand as more companies move to the cloud, and since the pandemic the company has adopted a remote-first approach. JumpCloud has 300 employees and plans to add 200–250 over the next year with a goal of adding 500 in the next couple of years. The company emphasizes diversity and inclusion in hiring by ensuring diverse candidates are included in every role's hiring pool. Financially, it recently raised a $75 million Series E and has now raised more than $166 million in total, according to Crunchbase. JumpCloud provides a cloud-based directory service that gives users one set of credentials to securely access systems, apps, networks, and file servers regardless of platform, protocol, provider, or location. The platform targets companies and Managed Service Provider (MSP) partners that need centralized identity and access management. Led by CEO Rajat Bhargava, the company plans to use new funding to expand engineering, sales, and marketing operations. It also intends to drive new functionality for customers and MSP partners. JumpCloud will establish a physical presence in strategic areas globally to provide deeper local support. Financially, the company recently raised $50M in funding to support these initiatives.

Participated · Series D · Jul 2021

Algolia is best known for its search-as-a-service product that provides developer-friendly, real-time search via an API with results that load with each keystroke. The company serves over 10,000 customers including Slack, Stripe, Medium, Zendesk and Lacoste, and handles more than 1.5 trillion search queries per year. Algolia has expanded beyond its core search API into other real-time APIs such as Algolia Recommend and Predict to deliver product recommendations and to analyze visitor intent. Financially, Algolia reported annual recurring revenue growth of 180% year-over-year, though it did not disclose absolute revenue figures. The company was originally founded in France and has recently shifted leadership, with co-founder Nicolas Dessaigne moving to a non-operational role and Bernadette Nixon serving as CEO. Algolia has also recruited several senior executives over the past 18 months as it focuses on building a long-term enterprise business. Algolia provides an API-based search-as-a-service that enables sites and apps to add fast, customizable search without building search infrastructure in-house. The company offers supplementary tools such as search analytics and A/B testing to help customers optimize results and understand user behavior. Algolia plans to invest this funding into R&D—including work on voice search—and to further expand globally across Europe, North America and Asia Pacific. It has more than 8,000 customers (up from about 3,000 in June 2017) and has been active in Asia since 2014, recently doubling down in Japan. Algolia was founded in France and is now based in San Francisco. The company is positioning itself for enterprise-focused growth and deeper integrations with platforms such as Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Algolia is a software-as-a-service company offering a hosted search engine API that returns fast, relevant results with minimal integration. Developers feed their search data to Algolia and customize ranking, after which Algolia’s servers return results as users type. The company reports annual recurring revenue doubling every year and serves 3,000 customers while handling 25 billion searches per month. Product additions include Algolia Offline for weak/no-signal situations and optimizations for places. Algolia positions itself as the turnkey search layer for sites and apps and aims to expand its customer base and feature set. The company operates offices in Paris, San Francisco, New York City and Atlanta and plans to open a London office. Algolia provides developers, product managers, and end users with a hosted Search-as-a-Service API that can be set up in hours or days and returns relevant results in milliseconds. The product targets websites and mobile apps and is designed to handle high volumes of data quickly. The company says it serves over 600 paying customers across 50 countries, including CrunchBase, Genius.com, Vevo, Medium, WeWork, Teespring, Arc’teryx and Product Hunt. Algolia plans to use its recent funding for product development, international expansion and hiring. Founded in 2012 by Nicolas Dessaigne and Julien Lemoine, the company is based in San Francisco and Paris. Philippe Botteri of Accel Partners will take a seat on the company’s board following the financing. Algolia builds a hosted real-time search engine and API used to replace or augment site and app search. The team has search experience (some engineers previously worked at Exalead) and initially sold a $99 mobile SDK before moving to larger website customers. Customers named in the article include Vestiaire Collective, USA Today’s Reviewed.com, Hacker News and Product Hunt; the company grew from 0 to about 200 customers in the reported year. Algolia recently launched analytics features to make the product more appealing to bigger clients and to support further growth. Financially, the company is not yet generating significant revenue according to investors, though backers see a clear path to millions in revenue. Algolia was accelerated by Y Combinator and TheFamily.

Participated · Equity · Jun 2021

Lucid offers a visual collaboration suite centered on Lucidchart (intelligent diagramming) and Lucidspark (virtual whiteboard) that enables teams to ideate, design and collaborate in real time. The company frames its products as critical tools for hybrid work and an end-to-end experience from idea to reality. Lucidspark, launched in October 2020, has amassed more than one million users and seen rapid market receptivity. Lucid surpassed $100 million in ARR in Q1 2020, reported record bookings in April 2021 with growth over 100% year‑over‑year, and derives roughly one‑third of revenue from outside the U.S. Its customer base includes Google, GE, NBC Universal, T‑Mobile and 99% of the Fortune 500; partners include Google, Atlassian, AWS, Salesforce and Microsoft. The company says it will continue expanding its visual collaboration offerings and work with investors to drive the next phase of growth. Lucid offers two cloud-based visual workspace applications, Lucidchart and Lucidpress, that combine diagramming, data visualization, collaboration and brand management. The company reports more than 27 million users across over 180 countries and serves 99% of the Fortune 500, with customers such as Google, GE, NBC Universal and Johnson & Johnson. Lucid has partnerships with Google, Atlassian, Amazon Web Services, Salesforce and Microsoft. The company recently opened its second international office and established APAC headquarters in Melbourne, Australia. Leadership is led by co-founder and CEO Karl Sun. Lucid announced it has passed $100m in annual recurring revenue and plans to continue product innovation, expand its Lucidchart visual reasoning engine, and pursue international expansion and potential M&A. Lucidchart is a cloud-based visual productivity platform that enables users to understand and share ideas, information and processes by building flowcharts, mockups, UML diagrams and more. Led by CEO and co‑founder Karl Sun and based in South Jordan, Utah, the platform supports real‑time collaboration. The solution is used in over 180 countries by more than 15 million users, with customers including Google, GE, NBC Universal and Johnson & Johnson. The company also operates Lucidpress, a sister brand templating product with over 5 million users for creating on‑brand marketing collateral. Lucidchart intends to use the new capital to accelerate growth, expand product development and introduce the platform worldwide. Financially, the company closed a $72M funding round and has raised $114M in total to date. LucidChart is a browser-based diagramming and visual-collaboration tool built on HTML5 and JavaScript that requires no plugins. Its core product lets users create flowcharts, wireframes, mockups, mind maps, organizational charts and UML diagrams, with realtime multi-user collaboration and an integrated group chat. The app supports Visio import without losing edits, and the team is adding compatibility with OmniGraffle. Pricing includes a free tier (two collaborators, 25MB of storage, and 60 objects per document) and paid personal, professional, and team plans that scale up to $25 per month. The company raised $1 million in seed funding and plans to use the capital to ramp up hiring and position the app as a viable alternative to desktop diagramming software. CEO Karl Sun has framed LucidChart as an example of what HTML5 can achieve for visual and graphical applications compared with desktop software.

Participated · Equity · Jun 2021

Founded in 2010 by Karl Sun and Ben Dilts, Utah-based Lucid Software develops visual collaboration platforms that replace traditional documents with dynamic, cloud-native canvases. Its flagship products are Lucidchart, an intelligent diagramming solution, and Lucidspark, a virtual whiteboard launched in October 2020 that was built in just four months. The suite is used by 99% of Fortune 500 companies and counts more than 40 million total users; Lucidspark alone has attracted over one million users and customers such as Sonos, Jaguar Land Rover and HubSpot since launch. The company believes hybrid work will dominate post-pandemic collaboration and positions its software as the virtual infrastructure for that model. Recent secondary financing pushed Lucid’s valuation to $3 billion, tripling its prior mark. Management expects the fresh investor base to support accelerated product development, global expansion and potential preparation for a public listing.