Blog Category: Investment

Despite promises to the contrary, businesses today must spend a great deal of time and effort collecting data. Even in 2019, many organizations still have a hard time with the basics of locating relevant business data and the context necessary to make it accessible to business-intelligence users. This disconnect puts BI investments at risk and degrades the experienced value of business intelligence for millions of companies.

This data issue is not going to get easier. According to Forrester’s Machine Learning Data Catalog, Q2 2018 Wave report, between 36 and 38 percent of global data and analytics decision-makers reported that their data totaled 1,000 TB or more in 2017. In 2016, that number was only 10 to 14 percent of decision makers. A slowdown in data growth isn’t anywhere in sight. With the growth in data volume, there has been an equally dizzying growth in data interpretation and analysis tools available to businesses to extract value from the data they are sitting on.

At Sapphire, we are firm believers that the greatest leverage for understanding data comes from a single, but very real, source of reference that serves as the basis for creating a business culture defined by trust in data.

Today, we are excited to announce our lead in the $50 million Series C investment in Alation, a company we believe is helping companies build that single source of reference for data. Alation was the first to bring a data catalog to market with an approach based on the founders’ deep technical understanding, and keen desire to unlock the value of billions of dollars invested in self-service analytics initiatives.

Sapphire has a long history of investing in the business intelligence market and have been on the quest to support enterprises with the best tools in the data and business intelligence market. Alation has become a leader in the data catalog space, scaling to help people find, understand and use the underlying data of their business.

So, why is a data catalog like Alation’s important in this world of ever increasing data investments?

The Role of the Data Catalog

If the underlying challenge businesses face is having too many data sources across too many locations, generating conflicting data, they need a way to rationalize that data into a singular source of reference.

This is where a data catalog comes in — a place to centralize data knowledge in a single location, allowing users to self-serve, while providing accuracy and consistency across data silos.

The Alation Data Catalog was a solution that helped start this machine-learning data catalog trend. Alation created a premier data cataloging solution that has revolutionized the old approach of metadata management. Today’s data catalogs create that critical single source of reference for distributed data knowledge by doing something innovative:

• indexing the metadata in enterprise databases like Teradata and RedShift,
• parsing the queries for metadata created in business intelligence tools like Tableau, and
• creating new metadata from observing processing behaviors in analyst work done on file systems like Cloudera.

Similar to how Google crawls the public Internet, the Alation Data Catalog automatically sifts through, parses and indexes all data and metadata. To make the user experience seamless, Alation also applies machine learning to look for patterns and continually make recommendations to improve the human understanding of the data it parses. This simplifies human data discovery by simplifying search processes, improves analyst productivity through data recommendations and provides a foundation for driving improvements for many other use cases and user profiles.

We met Satyen Sangani in 2013, well before Alation raised its Series A. Immediately, we were impressed by his passion and the vision for defining a new software solution. Since then, he and his team have not only built a scalable technical solution, but helped create the category of data catalog by helping companies understand the need for this important data layer. We are thrilled to partner with Alation to bring Sapphire’s experience and resources to their journey to become a company of consequence by returning corporate data to a single and irrefutable source of truth.

At Sapphire Ventures, when we think of investing in “companies of consequence” we think of monster spaces, emerging and disruptive technologies, and companies with clear value propositions. It’s hard to think of a better fit for those characteristics than a company that’s creating the connective tissue layer between the various elements of the transportation and logistics space. And who better to lead a company to disrupt a trillion-dollar industry than a team who has done it before. That is why we are so excited to join Jett McCandless (CEO) and team with our newest Series C investment in project44.

A White Lie

This is a bit embarrassing to admit, but I first came across Jett and project44 more than two years ago when I emailed Jett multiple times asking if he would be able to meet while I was in Chicago for meetings or a conference here or there. What Jett found out while co-writing this blog was that I had fabricated those trips so that in the case he agreed to a meeting I could quickly book a flight. True story. But, that’s how taken I was with the concept of bringing a fully automated, real-time API visibility layer to the shipping space.

I won’t confess to how many trips I faked to Chicago before our first meeting, but I will admit that our excitement in what project44 was building only grew as we spoke with shippers, carriers and third-party logistics players who were tired of using phones, faxes and outdated EDI solutions to track shipments. project44 provides a digital API solution that connects all the elements of this supply chain with trusted, normalized data in real-time that can easily be shared and analyzed to ensure optimization of shipments. Think Stripe, Twilio and Mulesoft*, but for shipping. This is one of those huge spaces with a no-brainer value proposition — to replace an asynchronous, human-intensive process of connecting dots in the air with an automated, digital solution that takes only 15 seconds, not the traditional 15 minutes, to complete. And it’s able to do this thousands of times every day.

The Sound of Inevitability

The logistics industry is rapidly changing. Traditionally, it has lagged behind other industries in the adoption of nextgen technologies, which is somewhat surprising given the size of the space and the fragmentation between when a shipper looks to ship something and when a carrier ultimately delivers it. Call it an emerging wave, an inevitable modernization, or the Amazonification of an industry, but players in the space are realizing that as customer expectations become increasingly important, it’s not just about operational efficiencies anymore. Customers want and expect visibility into where shipments are and confidence in on-time delivery of those shipments. As we move toward an era of “liquid inventory,” limited human interaction and cobbling together vast amounts of siloed and ununified data just isn’t going to cut it anymore.

The Man to Do It

This is where Jett comes in. He started his career in the call center of a freight forwarder, taking call after call to tell the other person on the line that their shipment was on the way regardless of where it was at the time. He quickly realized there must be a better way to manage and track freight. Jett assembled a top-notch team of professionals with experience across the space to build what would quickly become the preeminent connective tissue that provides not only visibility, but also unifies every part of the process, from pricing to payment, across all modes and geographies.

We couldn’t be more elated to add project44 to the Sapphire family, and join Jett and his team as they revolutionize the shipping industry and help all players in the supply chain make better, faster and cheaper decisions to ultimately get customers what they need when they need it.

A First Impression and Lasting Partnership

My first thought about Kevin Diestel was, “Wow, this guy must really love visiting Chicago, he’s here all the time!” In retrospect, even though Chicago is a world-class city with many cultural and culinary attractions, I soon realized that Kevin was very serious about project44 and he was “leaning in” to learn more about our company. In hindsight and unknowingly, I was playing hard to get. It was clear after our first meeting that we were “kindred spirits”. It takes a unique perspective, which Kevin and I share, to get as excited as we are, about bringing advanced visibility solutions to the transportation and logistics markets. Finding somebody with that passion matched with the focus, drive and operational acumen to make it happen is rare, and once we were finally able to sit down and talk, it quickly became clear to me that Kevin saw the same potential here that I do.

In truth, it was his persistence that spoke volumes. Seeing how committed Kevin and Sapphire were to understanding our vision and market, I knew that they saw as much value in the work we’re doing as my team and I see. That’s a large part of what ultimately led us to partner with Sapphire — they understand the massive potential behind connecting the freight industry, they see the incredible benefit this can bring to everyone and everything that touches the supply chain, and they recognize that we have the team and the resources to get the job done.

Having a team like Sapphire behind us is a tremendous strength and competitive advantage. They don’t just make financial investments, they invest in the growth and success of their portfolio companies. I’m as committed to the success of my team members as I am to the success of the company, and I only partner with people and organizations who share that view and passion. That’s what I see in Sapphire, and that’s what makes me so excited about collaborating and scaling with them. With investors like Sapphire Ventures helping us on our journey, we are extremely confident that we will succeed in connecting the world’s transportation ecosystem and increase trust and predictability in the industry.

I’m thrilled to announce that Sapphire Ventures is leading the Series D financing for Pendo, an incredibly exciting SaaS business re-defining the product and user experience software category. I’m happy to welcome Todd Olson, CEO of Pendo, to the Sapphire family and to share his views here on why he decided to partner with Sapphire. But first, let me tell you my partners and I decided to Spendo on Pendo!

Why Partner with Pendo?

At its core, Pendo provides a product cloud platform that improves users’ experience with digital services. As I spend a good portion of my time searching for the next big SaaS business, I’ve come to the realization that the largest and most sustainable differentiator from one application to the next isn’t necessarily based on technical complexity. Rather, the ability for end-users, folks like me and you, to achieve rapid time-to-value and experience ongoing satisfaction with the product is paramount.

Pendo is the enabler behind this broader trend as they allow folks in product, UI/UX, customer support and success organizations to understand user behavior within their digital services and iterate on product features and flows, but also inform smart in-app communication as a result of the deep analytics they are collecting. They smartly combine visibility via analytics with action via communication — a combination that dozens of customers were thrilled by. The next product and experience cloud platform is in the making!

As we at Sapphire seek to partner with “companies of consequence,” the team ends up being one of, if not the, most critical driver. Let’s begin with Todd. I first met Todd in mid-2016 and despite Pendo being early for our stage focus back then, I came away incredibly excited about what he was building and his product-driven approach to the business. That said, given any company at this stage, execution risk was still meaningful. Fast forward 2+ years and, admittedly much to my pleasant surprise, Todd had nailed the plan he had laid out for me way back then. Execution — check!

That said, execution without leadership can only get you so far. More impressive than Todd’s ability to execute, is his ability to lead, proven by the management team he’s been able to attract, many of whom were hired only in the last two years — Bill Binch (CRO), Jennifer Kaelin (CFO), Jake Sorofman (CMO) and many others. Bottom line — Pendo’s team, led by Todd and his co-founders Erik Troan, Rahul Jain, and Eric Boduch, is one of the strongest I’ve seen. The intangibles are what create something special and Pendo’s got it!

Ultimately, however, venture capital investing isn’t as formulaic as I or others may make it sound. Investment decisions are often influenced by the relationship, the human connection between entrepreneur and investor given we’re in this together for the long haul. To that end, Todd’s unique combination of being incredibly down-to-earth yet fiercely competitive with an unrelenting desire to win deeply resonated with me and my partners and will make for a great partnership!

Why Partner with Sapphire Ventures?

If I had two words to describe Rajeev, they’d be enthusiastic and persistent. As he mentioned above, we met two years ago during our Series B fundraise and while he didn’t invest then, he stayed in nearly constant contact. Almost like clockwork, he’d ping me each quarter and my response was always the same: We’re not fundraising; we’re focused on execution. When I finally agreed to re-engage this summer, Rajeev came prepared with insights from nearly two dozen customer conversations. Moreover, his comments and takeaways showed a level understanding about the nuance of our product and business that impressed me.

Raising four rounds of venture funding has taught me that it’s not about the money — it’s about the people. You can get money from anywhere. The people affect your company (and life) far more. We’re fortunate to have investors that help us close customers, recruit great people, and push us to realize our full potential. We’re betting that Rajeev brings the same level of tenacity to company-building as he demonstrated during the fundraising process. We’re on a mission to transform how software is created and delivered, and we can always use more advocates willing to roll up their sleeves and unwilling to accept “no” as an answer.

Even more unique in my due diligence is their Portfolio Growth team, which is dedicated to helping their companies successfully scale. The Sapphire Portfolio Growth platform regularly leverage their global CXO network to make valuable introductions to customers, partners and executive talent. We’re also excited to be speaking at their annual CIO Summit in October, which will help us elevate the Pendo message to a powerful group of Global 2000 CIOs, Silicon Valley CEOs and industry thought leaders. Through all of my reference calls and interactions, it was clear that Sapphire’s Portfolio Growth team is more than just talk — they are all about impact and outcomes.

Our Pendo Partnership

We are thrilled to welcome Todd and Pendo to the Sapphire family and can’t wait for the journey ahead!

Today at Sapphire Ventures, we are extremely excited to announce our lead investment in Reonomy, a New York based company that is revolutionizing the way data is used in the commercial real estate (CRE) market.

Over the last several years, we’ve been fortunate to partner with folks that are upending the database and data warehouse markets and we’ve invested in multiple generations of companies advancing the state-of-the-art in data transformation, data preparation, business intelligence and analytics. We’ve also had great fun and success working with entrepreneurs who have changed a software vertical or service landscape altogether (e.g. corporate HR, retail and CPG commerce, government operations) by offering innovative functionality that is married with good data — a trend that continues with our investment in Reonomy.

When we first met Rich Sarkis (CEO) and the rest of the Reonomy team, we were intrigued, in part, by the size of the end markets they were beginning to disrupt. More importantly however, we were truly fascinated by the complexity of the problem they had solved and the ease with which we were able to understand the applications they had built, even as CRE newbies. The fact that we genuinely enjoyed and appreciated our interactions with everyone on the team, and that the hockey-stick growth in the business was labeled “actual” — not “forecast” — only fueled our excitement. Ultimately, we decided to lean in on leading Reonomy’s Series C round despite the Company having raised funds earlier this year and having sufficient cash on hand to support its operations.

So, what makes Reonomy so exciting? In their own words, Reonomy is “lifting the veil on commercial real estate”, through data and applications that provide transparency across markets, which are extremely dispersed (spread across 3k+ counties and 20k+ municipalities in the U.S. alone), “dirty” and dynamic. Reonomy constantly aggregates and cleanses this data, selling data APIs as well as applications that are useful for participants in CRE markets such as brokers, investors, lenders, retailers, etc. Because of this, Reonomy is able to provide information around property details, property owner details (often deliberately obscured), transaction and valuation information, as well as workflow, visualization, and discovery capabilities. Today, Reonomy’s database spans 100M+ companies, 150M+ people and 99% of commercial properties in the U.S., which gives the Company an unprecedented understanding of the CRE lending and ownership landscape.

Reonomy started offering its solutions in New York City prior to launching a nationwide product and gaining significant momentum in the second half of last year. Given our experience helping young, hyper-growth companies scale to successfully support rapid and efficient growth over the long term, we are extremely excited to get involved at this point in the Company’s journey and are looking forward to helping Reonomy bring data disruption to CRE and its related markets!

Today, I’m excited to announce our Series D investment in Outreach, a fast-growing provider of the leading SaaS customer engagement platform. At Sapphire, we have a mantra of backing “Companies of Consequence” and we believe Outreach fits the bill. Beyond me telling you why, Manny Medina, CEO at Outreach, was gracious enough to also share his thoughts on why he chose to partner with Sapphire Ventures.

But first, what does a customer facing engagement platform really mean? In my view, engaging with prospects and customers, for a variety of purposes, should be the #1 activity of any go-to-market organization. Outreach has created the engine that powers smarter and more scalable customer communication. This ultimately enables sales and other customer-facing teams to scale their day-to-day workflow in an automated, yet intelligent and still personalized manner.

While we see Salesforce.com and other CRM providers as the prevailing systems of record, there is a significant opportunity for a system of engagement that activates and potentially improves that underlying CRM dataset — enter Outreach.

Why Partner with Outreach?
I first met Manny in late 2015 and have been tracking him since. While It was clear that Outreach was on to something special, what really intrigued us at Sapphire was Manny and the rest of the team. After our latest discussions, I walked away impressed that he had executed on the goals he set back in 2015 — remarkable for any entrepreneur, but especially for a company in its earlier stages, as they were back then.

What truly distinguishes Manny in my view, however, is his unique combination of product vision and go-to-market understanding. Most mid-to-late stage SaaS entrepreneurs I meet tend to be either technical, product-driven founders or sales-first execution maestros. Manny encompasses both. This is critical because while GTM execution is key, having a strong product-led company and vision is what creates a longer-term moat and sustainable differentiator.

Further, Manny is relentlessly obsessed with his customers, his team and his business. He has an intensity of focus and work ethic (4:30 am emails from Manny is commonplace) that is coupled with his ability to authentically and passionately tell the Outreach story. This inspires customers, employees and investors to buy-in to his vision.

Look no further for evidence of this than the talented team that surrounds Manny. Andrew (co-founder), Anna (COO), Matt (Sales), Mike (Customer Success), and the rest of the employees all march to the same energetic, customer-focused beat.

Finally, what really sealed the deal for us was Manny’s maniacal focus on what we believe should be the primary KPI for SaaS businesses — user engagement. More on this North Star metric below from Manny.

Why Partner with Sapphire Ventures?
When I met Rajeev Dham a few years ago, Rajeev was a rising star at Sapphire with uncommon knowledge about our space. Most VCs know a lot about marketing or ad tech, but very few have more than passing knowledge of sales tech. Many have been burned betting against Salesforce, so they stay away from anything that comes even close to CRM.

However, our first conversation with Rajeev piqued my interest — let me explain. For me, Outreach is a labor of love and my life. I am not a serial anything. Outreach is it. I expect the same level of commitment and knowledge of the space from a potential partner. Rajeev proved to be just that kind of partner. From the get go, he understood the landscape and the customer pain CRM left unsolved. He not only understood it, he had the conviction to bet on it. Mind you, this is a very competitive space and is growing rapidly as it is being defined. That drives away timid investors. Not Rajeev.

Also, given Sapphire’s track record backing world-class enterprise companies, Rajeev understood our unorthodox approach to B2B SaaS: at Outreach we care deeply about active users and tracking engagement with the application. We fundamentally believe that if we provide value to the users, they will reward us by taking more actions on Outreach to drive their customer relationships forward. The more actions taken on Outreach, the more data our members generate that we can use in machine learning models to automate those actions and give our members time back. Automation in turn creates higher engagement.

This virtuous cycle of engagement-driving-automation-driving-engagement is common in consumer applications like Facebook, but rare in business applications. But that is our secret sauce: consumer-like thinking drives customer obsession across Outreach. Seeing Rajeev and the Sapphire team’s excitement about pushing the envelope in customer engagement by using a consumer approach to enterprise applications was the genesis of this exciting partnership.

A Perfect Partnership
The feelings here are mutual and we’re thrilled to welcome Outreach to the Sapphire family. We look forward to partnering with Manny and the Outreach team on their journey of becoming a Company of Consequence.

Digital transformation involves bringing different thinking, innovation, business models and strategy into all aspects of the business to improve experiences of employees, customers, suppliers and partners. At Sapphire Ventures, we believe that an identity and access management (IAM) strategy is crucial to the success of digital transformation. However, the growth of cloud computing and an increasingly distributed mobile world make IAM more complex every day.

Today, we are privileged to announce that we have led the $55M Series D investment in Auth0. We have a long history of supporting developers with investments in DevOps platforms that simplify the life of the developer. Auth0 has grown and solved complex and large-scale identity use cases for more than 3,000 global customers with their easy to use API-based platform. When we had a chance to partner with them, we jumped at the opportunity.

We were already excited about Auth0’s rapid growth, scale of the business, and global customer reach. As we embarked on the due diligence process, we developed a further appreciation for management’s attention to values, the tirelessly-working global team and Auth0’s open and transparent culture — something that resonated well with us.

So, why is identity and access management so important for the enterprise? IAM solutions provide the ability to manage electronic identity for accessing information and resources. In other words, IAM solutions secure content from unauthorized access by injecting authentication layers between the users and the critical apps and data. With the growth of cloud-based and Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, users now have the power to log in to critical business apps like Salesforce, Office365, Concur, and more anytime, from any place, using any device.

Auth0 was built with developers in mind, eliminating the need to create and maintain an authentication codebase through its API platform. Its identity platform offers building blocks and SDKs to enable customers to build what they want. The platform is built with a broad spectrum of use cases in mind, covering identity and access management for consumer applications (B2C), SaaS software (B2B) as well as internal employees (B2E) and partners. Auth0’s customers span some of the largest B2B SaaS, financial services, healthcare, retail and media companies — providing them reliable, secure and scalable support.

When I first met Auth0 co-founders, Eugenio Pace and Matias Woloski, it was inspiring to see their mission of unifying the current siloed approach to identity management. They’ve since grown Auth0 to power more than 40 million daily logins, providing single sign-on and user management for web, internal applications and APIs. We are excited to bring our experience and resources forward, and partner with Auth0 on their journey to become a company of consequence and completely change the Identity-as-a-Service market.

With the current set of Business Intelligence (BI) tools that are used in an enterprise, a knowledge worker today simply gets a set of dashboards of graph and charts, with no information about the underlying data. If they want to drill down on any information, they’re stuck waiting for an answer from a data analyst, BI professional or data scientist. Unfortunately, waiting isn’t an option in a day and age when competition is global, 24×7 and extremely cut-throat. As a result, many revert to gut based decision-making without leveraging all the data that is available and the insights that it could provide them.

Today, we are privileged to announce our investment in ThoughtSpot which empowers knowledge workers in the enterprise with its simple search & AI-driven analytics platform. The company’s search-driven analytics empower knowledge workers to answer the questions they want to ask, but are unable to with the current set of BI tools. ThoughtSpot took this further with SpotIQ, the company’s new AI engine, which provides these same knowledge workers with insights to questions they care about, but wouldn’t even know to ask. With ThoughtSpot, the enterprise user becomes highly analytical, productive and able to make a meaningful positive impact to the bottom line.

We have known Ajeet Singh (CEO and co-founder) since his days at Nutanix, a Sapphire Ventures portfolio company, where he was the chief product officer and co-founder. He then went on to found ThoughtSpot to realize his vision of enabling knowledge workers and business people to look for insights and analyze enterprise data in the same way that all of us use Google to search the Internet. Ajeet assembled a stellar team of engineers and product managers that not only built his vision of a search-driven metaphor for analyzing data, but also made the platform extremely scalable and easy to deploy and manage on the cloud or on-premise. On top of this, the team has built AI and machine-learning capabilities to answer questions that a knowledge worker had never thought of asking, but which makes the analysis much more accurate and insightful.

ThoughtSpot is now entering the phase where it must scale and grow globally so that it can continue to empower thousands of enterprises and millions of their knowledge workers to be data-driven and analytical, just like the knowledge workers at Capital One, Celebrity Cruises, Chevron, Miami Children’s Hospital, OpenTable, Sterling National Bank, and ServiceNow all of whom are current customers. We are excited to help ThoughtSpot continue its rapid growth and help the Company scale globally, with the help of our Portfolio Growth team, which will tap into its enterprise CXO network to help ThoughtSpot navigate the complexities of partnering with and selling to large enterprise corporations on a global scale.

ThoughtSpot is democratizing analytics and boosting productivity by enabling knowledge workers to make sound, data-driven decisions even though they don’t have the time, ability, or interest to be a Business Analyst or a Data Scientist. We are looking forward to partnering with ThoughtSpot on their journey to become a company of consequence and completely change the analytics market.

Brick-and-mortar retailers are increasingly worried that ecommerce (AKA Amazon) will take their customers and leave them bankrupt. And, they’re not wrong to fear this outcome with so many retailers, like Toys’R’us, Sears, RadioShack, Payless, etc., going bankrupt. Paradoxically, Amazon recently made its largest acquisition when it acquired Whole Foods, a brick-and-mortar grocery store, and it is also opening retail stores across the country. Why the sudden interest in brick-and-mortar? Amazon knows that 90% of worldwide retail spending is still in brick-and-mortar stores, and will likely stay that way, because online shopping can never provide the same experience as a retail store where customers can touch and feel the goods they are looking to purchase.

Brick-and-mortar retailers are much more worried about this latest development from Amazon, since it has the chance to change and dominate brick-and-mortar retail by tailoring the retail experience for each customer through automation and data-mining technologies from its ecommerce business. To compete, traditional retailers need a friend on their side who can provide them with the same automation and data-mining technologies for in-store customer experience that Amazon has built and refined in ecommerce.

Today, we are excited to announce our investment in Punchh (“Company”), which enables brick-and-mortar retailers to acquire and retain customers while increasing the total amount that a customer is spending with that retailer. The Company’s AI and machine-learning driven products allow retailers to analyze, communicate and grow relationships with customers by incorporating and acting on the right data at the right time. Punchh has built its enterprise-grade products on a cloud-based platform that works for both retailers with nascent IT capabilities and the ones with deep IT capabilities. By tapping into Punchh’s comprehensive out-of-the-box functionality and significant customizability, retailers can roll out bespoke solutions in just weeks — in other words, compete at the “speed of Amazon”.

Gartner estimates that only one-quarter of retailers have a consistent, unified view of customer information across the organization. Punchh not only unifies all the customer information data into one “system of record” but also enables retailers to build behavioral loyalty with their customers by understanding who their best customers are, how they behave, and identifying ways to tap into and stay attuned to their evolving needs.

The world of brick-and-mortar retailers is moving towards an era where stores will be check-out free — cameras and sensors will track what shoppers remove from the shelves and what they put back. Cash registers and checkout lines will become superfluous — customers will be billed after leaving the store using credit cards on file. Attracting the customer to the store, stocking the right type of goods for these customers and being able to upsell these customers with impulse purchases while in the store all become tantamount to success. The Punchh product roadmap over the next several years is specifically designed to help retailers on this journey.

The founding team at Punchh built their business without the luxury of raising mega rounds, and battled against bigger and more well-financed competitors, all of whom have since fallen by the wayside. This frugal beginning has allowed the Punchh founders to truly understand how it feels to be the underdog, empathize with the brick-and-mortar retailers it sells to, and build a very efficient business model.

In the past, we at Sapphire Ventures have helped businesses with efficient business models i.e. high net revenue retention rates and very efficient sales models, scale into global category leaders. We are excited to help the Punchh team scale and expand internationally on their journey to become the savior of brick-and-mortar retailers in their fight to stay relevant.

Manchester has long been known as the birthplace of iconic bands and great football. So far, it has not been known for great software companies, but we see that changing because today we are pleased to announce our lead investment in Manchester-founded, Matillion.

I was first introduced to Matthew Scullion, the Matillion CEO and co-founder, by Brain Gentile, the former CEO of Jaspersoft, a portfolio company that was acquired by Tibco in 2014. As Matthew and I started talking we quickly connected over a shared sense of values, culture and drive. This first impression was reasserted when Matthew presented to the rest of the Sapphire team in the typical Monday morning meeting. What was not typical was how he got to the meeting. Due to adverse weather, his flight was delayed, then canceled; he then had to reroute, stopover in NY and transfer between airports; he ended up sleeping on a bench at Newark and instead of arriving a day ahead, he arrived just 15 minutes late to our meeting. Without mentioning his Odyssey, he briefly apologized for being slightly late due to traffic. He continued completely unfazed presenting Matillion and his vision with true passion and honest conviction.

So, Matthew is great, but what does Matillion do?

Matillion solves a sophisticated data integration problem delivered through a user friendly, almost consumer-like experience with high performance and in a freemium model.

Most enterprise data is distributed and often stored on-premise in application silos. Matillion enables the movement of data assets via its integration with those on-premise data stores to cloud-based data warehouses such as Amazon Redshift, Snowflake and Google BigQuery.

What really sets Matillion apart is its product, which offers customers the flexibility to use it as a traditional three-step ETL tool or as a more efficient two-step ELT tool where data is transformed in the target system. This dual offering is critical because with the advent of cheaper, infinitely scalable and fast cloud-based analytical databases, there is an increasing demand for ELT based tools. Matillion combines a user friendly and intuitive interface with sophisticated collaboration functionalities that allow for projects to be shared and collaborated on in real-time. The Matillion tool is delivered via a cloud image and does not require any additional infrastructure, making it easy to deploy and scale in a self-serve model. And, customers can purchase Matillion directly from AWS or Google marketplaces and its adaptive pricing model (“pay by the drink”) allows for incremental adoption.

With a growing need for cloud integration tools, we see an emerging market opportunity created by a major shift from conventional to modern data integration tools, and we believe Matillion is well positioned to seize this opportunity with its great team, unique product and easy to consume business model. We are very excited to partner with Matthew and the rest of the Matillion team to help with the next steps of their exciting journey.