If a New York startup is making noise with exciting tech and innovative ideas, there is usually no shortage of venture capitalists looking to invest and support.
According to the CB Insights 2021 State of Venture Report, New York raised a staggering $55 billion in venture funding last year, more than tripling the $18 billion the area raised in 2020. In fact, the report stated that for every $2 invested in Silicon Valley, $1 now goes to New York. So which startups should you be keeping your eye on for some big investment spending?
Four New York tech companies have good reason to be on everyone’s radar. Built In NYC sat down with leaders from software purchasing platform Tropic, private intelligence search engine Grata, automated mobile testing platform Waldo and Medicare navigation platform Chapter to discuss how they knew the time was right to raise a round of funding — and what they plan to do with their new capital.
When was your last funding round, how much did you raise and how much funding has your company now raised in total?
We raised a $25 million Series A in August and we just raised another $40 million in a Series B that closed in December. Our total funding is now $67.1 million.
Why did your team feel that the time was right to raise a round of funding?
Our revenue doubled in the four months between our Series A in August and Series B in December 2021. We hadn’t planned on raising more and were actually preempted because the growth was so significant in such a short period of time. Insight Partners, who led our Series B, is a fantastic fund and the valuation and round size felt right for us, so we went for it.
The valuation and round size felt right for us, so we went for it.”
How do you plan to deploy this capital?
Tropic is hiring across every team! Product, engineering, marketing, sales, customer success, finance, services and operations are all growing quickly, so we’re deploying capital toward headcount. It’s an exciting time.
The product and engineering teams are firing on all cylinders and we have four major releases coming out in Q2 and Q3 that we will be investing heavily in and promoting. All around, this is a rocketship period.
When was your last funding round, how much did you raise and how much funding has your company now raised in total?
We just raised our $25 million Series A from Craft Ventures and announced in mid February 2022. We’ve raised $35 million to date.
Why did your team feel that the time was right to raise a round of funding?
It was a perfect storm of growth, product evangelism and market expansion. We grew our annual recurring revenue (ARR) eight-fold in 2021. Customers are making referrals, bringing Grata to their next job and engaging with Grata at record highs of over 30 minutes per day on average. We’re also seeing our total addressable market (TAM) accelerate at a faster rate than before, with middle market investing attracting interest from hedge funds, asset managers, family offices, VCs, search funds and corporates — all beyond traditional private equity.
Customers are making referrals, bringing Grata to their next job and engaging with Grata at record highs of over 30 minutes per day on average.”
How do you plan to deploy this capital?
We plan to spend $20 million on product development this year. Some of our big initiatives include the following:
1. Search and ML: We’re investing heavily in a specialized team focused on search. We’re looking for expertise in adjacent search applications like eCommerce, consumer search and B2B document search. The team will work cross-functionally across NLP engineers, designers and product managers.
2. Data: We’re further building our data team to acquire first party data via our intelligent web crawlers. We’re also adding data scientists who will sit at the cross section of AI and finance to develop new features around private company financials.
3. Key leaders: We’re adding leadership positions across our engineering and commercial teams, seeking a director of machine learning, lead designer, VP of people and sales enablement manager.
4. Last but not least, we’re investing in free lunch in the office!
When was your last funding round, how much did you raise and how much funding has your company now raised in total?
We announced our Series A during the first week of February 2022. We raised $15 million in a round led by Insight Partners, with continued participation by Matrix Partners and First Round Capital.
Why did your team feel that the time was right to raise a round of funding?
We started selling in 2020. Our goal was to reach a certain amount of ARR that proved that Waldo delivered value to customers. After completing this milestone, with a critical mass of customers, we realized we wanted to grow faster to execute on our vision and continue to deliver a world class product. That’s when we decided to start our roadshow.
We realized we wanted to grow faster to execute on our vision and continue to deliver a world class product.”
How do you plan to deploy this capital?
Our Series A funding will help us execute our product vision and grow faster. This includes scaling our GTM team to continue attracting more top-rated mobile apps and help them ship high-quality mobile products to the market. We’re glad to announce that Nico Snyder, formerly at Code Climate, recently joined Waldo as our VP of sales and Ben Winter, formerly at Fairmarkit, is now our VP of growth and marketing.
We also plan to continue innovating and solving the problem at hand to support our customers at scale, while providing more actionable signals to help them improve products and keep mobile app users satisfied.
Lastly, we’re planning on tripling our team size to approximately 60 people by the end of 2022, with a strong emphasis on go-to-market, product and engineering.
When was your last funding round, how much did you raise and how much funding has your company now raised in total?
We announced our Series B in January. We raised $42 million, bringing our total amount raised to over $60 million.
Why did your team feel that the time was right to raise a round of funding?
We were fortunate to find partners in Jason and Lee at Addition who share our vision and who are excited to help us scale. The timing was more opportunistic, but we’re excited to accelerate the pace at which we can help Americans navigate Medicare and retirement.
We’re expanding all of our teams, as well as building new ones.”
How do you plan to deploy this capital?
We’re investing in building the best platform to help Americans age with purpose and security. This means we’re expanding all of our teams, as well as building new ones. For engineers, we’re hiring across the stack for mid and senior level engineers. We plan to triple our product team this year and build a full marketing team. We’re also adding 50 licensed Medicare advisors to help Americans navigate the Medicare maze. We’ve spun up a data team to help improve the data available in Medicare and make sure we’re able to make data-driven decisions on behalf of our members.
