The Venture Codex

Participated · Seed · Jan 2024

Fullcast is an end-to-end revenue operations (RevOps) platform that lets companies design, manage, and track the performance of their revenue-generating teams and has strong G2 ratings. The product is initially focused on territory management, enabling companies to create territories quickly, optimize by product/region/industry, reallocate quotas in real time, and retain sales reps. It offers an AI-powered Copilot for RevOps to surface actionable insights and recommendations. Fullcast aims to become the first integrated RevOps platform for the entire Customer 360 journey and is positioning for significant growth as the RevOps market is projected to reach $18 billion over the next decade. Leadership is headed by CEO Ryan Westwood with co-founders Isaac Westwood (COO), Amy Cook (CMO), and Lance Evanson (CCO); Dharmesh Singh and Bala Balabaskaran remain as Chief Customer Officer and CTO respectively, and many team members previously worked together at Simplus. Financially, the company completed a $34 million seed round that includes $4 million in debt from Silicon Valley Bank, and the co-founders personally invested $8 million in the round. Fullcast is an end-to-end RevOps platform that brings sales strategy and the sales execution engine together. The product was created to unite all of the moving pieces of a sales Go-To-Market (GTM) by experts who understand Salesforce and integration needs. Fullcast empowers leading SaaS companies to continuously plan, execute, and analyze their GTM strategy instead of relying on annual plans. The company is based in Seattle. Fullcast recently closed a $4.0M Series A to accelerate revenue growth and continue investing in its RevOps platform. It plans to expand its product, sales, and marketing teams to meet market demand; Bob DeSantis, a former sales leader at DocuSign and Conga, will join the board. Fullcast.io develops software that automates the back-end sales operations work not directly related to selling, including sales quotas, territory definition and assignment, onboarding processes, contact tracking, and sales data compilation. The company positions itself as doing for sales operations what TurboTax did for calculating taxes, reducing repetitive and complex tasks so sales teams and sales-ops can focus on higher-value work. Co-founded by former Microsoft and Salesforce employees Dharmesh Singh (CEO) and Bala Balabaskaran (CTO) in November 2015, Fullcast.io is based in Bellevue and has eight employees. The startup signed its first paying customer in January 2017 and was on track to line up $500,000 in booked revenue for the February–April quarter. Fullcast.io cites complexity in sales operations as its moat and invests in customer success to manage churn and support growth. Competitors noted in the article include Anaplan (targeting larger companies) and OpsPanda (focused on sales planning), which Fullcast says it differentiates from by offering broader sales-operations support.

Led · Series A · Sep 2023

Erudit connects to apps companies already use (Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom) and runs collected data through AI algorithms to produce real-time people-analytics scores such as alignment, autonomy, engagement and satisfaction. The company says its models are trained by psychologists to extract and classify sentiment and to detect trigger phrases indicating stress or job searching. Erudit anonymizes chat data, allows customers to exclude individual employees, teams or departments, and processes checkpoints on a daily basis rather than in real time. The platform is used by “dozens” of businesses today. Erudit has 20 employees and expects to expand its team in the months ahead, particularly in customer support, customer success and sales. The product aims to replace lagging indicators like surveys, but the company and critics acknowledge privacy, bias and interpretation risks with monitoring employee communications. Erudit has developed technology that applies artificial intelligence and natural language processing to improve corporate talent management, studying employee personality, mental health and organizational climate. The company has a presence in the United States and its team comprises around 30 people from diverse sectors and experience areas. Erudit was founded by Alejandro Martínez Agenjo and Ricardo Michel Reyes and earned the Banco Santander and Universidad Europea award for best young social entrepreneurs in 2018. Early support came from IBM and Wayra (Telefónica’s accelerator), and the company has closed several financing rounds to date. The firm is exploring commercial opportunities with partners in areas such as M&A, culture and engagement, internal communication and reputational risk control through collaboration with investors. Erudit provides an AI-driven platform that passively collects data from business tools like Slack, GSuite, and Microsoft 365 and uses a proprietary algorithm to assess employee sentiment and burnout. The company launched an initial version of its platform in March 2021 and has seen rapid growth since. Erudit has 26 employees and currently has six remote openings, and has made several strategic hires including a head of partnerships and a CMO who previously led marketing at Cabify. The team has opened a new revenue channel through partnerships that enable reselling of its AI products. Financially, Erudit recently closed a $3.5M late seed round and plans to open a Series A before the end of the second quarter. Co‑founders Alejandro Martinez Agenjo and Ricardo Michel Reyes lead the company and have emphasized using the product to provide tangible human-capital metrics for executives and investors.

Participated · Series A · Nov 2022

Hwy Haul is a Santa Clara, CA–based digital freight platform that connects fresh produce shippers with truckers by eliminating intermediary friction and providing end-to-end digital applications. The platform emphasizes advanced cold-chain compliance and is built from the ground up using optimization algorithms, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Led by founder and CEO Syed Aman, the company targets the fresh produce supply chain including shippers, growers, distributors, wholesalers and retailers across North America. The company intends to use the $10M raised to establish direct relationships with enterprise accounts in the food and produce vertical. The article does not disclose revenue, user metrics, valuation, or the specific financial instruments used in the raise.

Participated · Equity · Dec 2021

Docket is a SaaS productivity platform that helps organizations manage hybrid meetings through agenda creation, note-taking, action-item tracking, and integrations with project management, chat, calendar, video communications, and CRM providers. Hundreds of companies across industries use Docket to bridge the gap between in-person and virtual meetings. The company plans to use its recent $3M funding to continue platform development, augment product integrations with key partners, and expand personnel across departments. New strategic hires include Camille Landau as Head of Marketing and Nicholas Hatley as Head of Sales, bringing marketing and Zoom sales leadership experience respectively. Docket has developed a close partnership with Zoom—having won Zoom’s App Marketplace Whale Watch Competition and being among the first Zoom Apps—and received investment from Zoom’s Apps Fund. Customers have recognized Docket on G2 for five consecutive quarters as a leader in meeting management software and as a Small Business Leader with Best Estimated ROI. Docket is a software-as-a-service productivity platform that enhances every stage of business meetings by enabling agenda creation, accurate note-taking, action assignment, and recap sharing. Its suite of features is designed to maximize time before, during, and after meetings and to facilitate human-led collaboration processes. The platform provides a growing library of integrations with leading chat, calendar, video communications and CRM providers to support meeting workflows. Docket emphasizes improving meeting habits and organizational alignment across teams. The company highlights traction from winning first place in Zoom’s Marketplace App competition and promotes integrations with Zoom to automate and streamline meetings. The recent funding is intended to expand engineering and customer success, with focus on platform growth, user acquisition, and long-term retention. Docket offers a SaaS meeting intelligence platform that centralizes agenda creation, note-taking, recaps and action-items while integrating with productivity tools like Google, Microsoft, Zoom, Evernote, Slack, HubSpot and Dropbox. The product is designed to improve meeting efficiency across the lifecycle — before, during and after meetings — by enabling collaborative agenda-building and shared documentation. Docket reports over 3,000 users leveraging the platform. The company plans to use new funding to grow its engineering, marketing and customer success teams and to invest in platform growth by adding native solutions and expanding its library of integrations. Led by CEO and co-founder Darin Brown, a SaaS veteran who previously served as CTO of Angie's List and held leadership roles at Salesforce and ExactTarget, Docket launched out of High Alpha's venture studio.

Participated · Seed · Aug 2021

Quark.ai provides an Autonomous Customer Support platform that leverages deep learning, natural language processing and computer vision to automate support functions. The platform helps enterprises quickly interpret complex customer support cases and deliver accurate, speedy resolutions. The company is led by CEO and co-founder Prosenjit Sen. Quark.ai raised over $5m in a seed-plus funding round and intends to use the proceeds to expand its platform. The financing underscores the company’s focus on scaling its autonomous support capabilities for enterprise customers. The company is based in San Jose, California.