Philippe Botteri

💸SaaS startup MoEngage has mopped up an additional $180 million as part of its ongoing funding round 📍This takes the total deal size up to $280 million. 💵💵ChrysCapital and MUFG-backed Dragon Fund led the latest infusion. 💵💵Of the latest transaction, about $57 million was primary capital, with the remainder comprising secondary share sales and an employee liquidity programme. 💵💵The $15 million employee share sale allowed 259 current and former employees to partially cash out. 📈📈“We'll start looking at some inorganic opportunities to better complement our product offerings or accelerate our global expansion. We will also strengthen our AI suite, as we have seen rapid adoption of our AI capabilities,” said CEO Raviteja Dodda. 📈📈On a potential public listing, CEO Raviteja Dodda said Moengage is still evaluating its options. ✍️: Ajay Rag

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Big milestone for Firmable. We’ve raised $14m Series A led by Airtree. Sales has moved through a few big waves: intuition-led, CRM-led, data-led. We’re now entering the next one – intelligence-led sales. The opportunity isn’t just better data. It’s turning that data into clear direction and action, without adding more work for sales teams. That’s what we’re building at Firmable: a foundation of trusted external data, layered with intelligence that helps sellers know who to focus on and when. Led by Airtree, this round supports our expansion across Asia and into the US – and accelerates the build-out of AI agents that take the admin work off sales teams so they can focus on what they do best. Proud of the team, grateful to our customers and investors. We’re just getting started. Read the exclusive in the AFR. https://lnkd.in/gr66uknb Leigh Jasper | Tara Salmon | Karthik Venkatasubramanian| Chester Thompson| Chath Widanapathirana

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There has been lots of debate recently on the term ARR. ➡️ What does it mean? ➡️ Why is it a much loved metric in the SaaS industry? ➡️ Is it now being misused? ➡️ Is it even relevant in the age of AI? 🧐 After way too many years thinking about & tracking ARR I've written a post that tries to answer these questions. 💡The tl;dr is that the power of ARR is in its compounding contribution to the bottom line & that recently we are seeing more & more examples of 'faux ARR' that falls well short of this standard. Click on the post to read more! Notion Capital Itxaso del Palacio, PhD Kamil Mieczakowski Chris Tottman Stephen Millard Stephen Chandler Jess Bartos Stephanie Opdam, CFA Patrick Norris Andreas Panayiotou Radu Bozga Maximilian Eichler Thomas Diehl #ARR #SaaS #AI https://lnkd.in/ey6NW7m2

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This HBR post is one of the most important articles to read and understand right now. The launch of Model Context Protocol (MCP) in 2024 will allow new “systems of work” to emerge and manage third party applications. This is a new category of software applications. I have been thinking of this as a terminal or workspace where employees will use a GenAI prompt to manage their data and applications. It is specifically useful in tasks that require some knowledge of math or software coding, because the AI can spin up a development environment, write and compile basic code, and perform infinite analytics on data in a fraction of the time it takes a human to do this work. This is also useful to streamline repetitive tasks that only humans could do previously, such as drafting documents, creating charts and graphs, and updating data in various system. We went through the Bureau of Labor Statistics and looked at job types (for instance equity research analyst, pharma researcher, appraiser, paralegal, software engineer) and our estimate is that there are tens of millions of potential clients in the US alone. Here is the link to the HBR article below. If you are working on one of these systems we would love to meet you and learn more. https://lnkd.in/ehismPBu

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SaaS raised the bar on how fast business is supposed to move. We expect dashboards to update in real time, approvals to route automatically, and data to sync across systems without anyone touching a thing. Speed is no longer a luxury feature. It is the baseline. And yet, in a lot of companies, the signature process still acts like a speed bump in an otherwise automated highway. The deal is aligned, stakeholders are on board, momentum is high, and then everything pauses while people chase emails, resend documents, or fix tiny errors that should have been caught upstream. It is a small step in theory, but in practice it quietly drags on revenue velocity and pulls ops teams into manual follow-up mode instead of strategic work. The real shift happening now is that signatures are moving from being a “final task” to being part of core workflow architecture. The teams that treat them as infrastructure, not admin, are the ones reducing cycle time, tightening operations, and scaling without adding process chaos. Here is the real question: if signing a document were as seamless as sending a message, where in your process would you suddenly start moving a lot faster? 🚀 #SaaS #eSignature #RevenueOps #SalesOps #DigitalWorkflow #BusinessOperations

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For all founders, especially tech founders, here are a few key insights on how to elevate your pitch. Definitely worth a read and some thought... Treeo VC https://lnkd.in/emM8RK_4

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As a board advisor, I’ve seen this pattern play out all too often: small to mid-sized technology businesses getting into real trouble not because of a bad product or a broken market, but because the executive team underestimates the importance of effective board communication and board relationship management. A business model pivot is one of the most critical and fragile periods in a company's life. Even in such high-stakes situations, I have witnessed executive teams mismanaging their board relationships, with expensive consequences for financial and human capital. I saw a profitable, cash-flow-positive SaaS business try to move from B2C to B2B, having already: • redirected resources • shifted management attention • started execution …all before the board had been properly engaged and crucially without a business plan. The initiative was blocked. Trust and goodwill were burned. The executive team had to go back to the drawing board, develop a detailed business plan, and restart discussions from scratch. Exactly what should have happened before resources were redeployed. Eventually, the board approved to give the executive team a 12 months window with a defined budget, setting expectations around traction and evidence. A year later, the B2B experiment had failed, the core business had suffered from loss of focus, and the executive team changed. Ironically, a renewed focus on the core business, with fresh leadership and discipline, put the company back on a growth path. Three lessons stand out: 1.             Boards don’t like surprises, trust is built through early engagement 2.             Pivots need real business plans, not conviction alone 3.             Focus is a strategic weapon, especially in scale-ups Boards are not there to block ambition. They’re there to protect the long-term health of the business. Executive teams that treat the board as a thinking partner, not an approval hurdle, make better decisions and move faster in the long run. More details about this topic in the article below https://lnkd.in/ep2MDvM9

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Good piece for Entrepreneur by my Volition Capital colleague, Tiger Henderson. We often see companies that have built their business on a single platform like Amazon, Shopify, Salesforce. Tiger walks through the key questions we ask on evaluating that risk: 1. Are incentives aligned with the underlying platform? 2. Who owns the end-user relationship? 3. Does the product embed itself deeply in workflows, or just sit on a feature layer? 4. Does the underlying platform have a history of developing its 3rd party ecosystem? 5. Does the CEO have a defined strategy to derisk the business over time? You can read the full article here: https://lnkd.in/epWhpcsd

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Most founding teams preparing for a Series A spend months getting their financials, narrative, and deck investor-ready. Very few spend time preparing the one thing that can quietly complicate a deal after term sheet conversations have already started — an honest, independent view of their technical foundation. This isn't a slight on technical leadership. The best CTOs I've encountered know their systems deeply. But there's a difference between knowing your system and seeing it the way an investor's technical reviewer will see it for the first time. A CTO who has built the product from the ground up has context that no external reviewer will ever fully have. But that same context creates blind spots. Decisions that made complete sense eighteen months ago — and probably were the right call at the time — look different when someone is evaluating whether your architecture can support a 10x growth claim in your pitch deck. The internal team has lived with those decisions long enough that they've stopped questioning them. An independent technical review before a raise isn't about finding problems your CTO missed. It's about seeing your own product through the lens of someone who will ask the questions your team stopped asking a long time ago. Investors at Series A are doing this more rigorously than ever. The founders who navigate it well aren't the ones with the most polished codebases. They're the ones who already knew what the reviewer was going to find — and had a clear, honest answer ready. Walking into due diligence without that independent view is the technical equivalent of letting an auditor see your books before your own accountant has reviewed them.

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fresh off the a16z press (link in comments)... We are at an interesting crossroads in what it takes to build Enterprise-focused software companies in the AI era. On one hand, companies are ramping faster - no longer is a 0 to 1M enough to raise your Series A a few years from launch. Companies are building with sub-5 member teams, and crossing previously unseen revenue benchmarks with extreme revenue efficiency and often profitability in a matter of months. On the other hand, fund sizes are becoming larger, Seed rounds are growing to 10s of millions and "early-stage" VCs (think non-Seed, multi-stage funds) are becoming conservative, wanting to see more traction before they fund. YC and other platforms are emerging as natural winners. How will the venture world look like 2 years from today? 🤔 (1) Will we see companies raising small rounds of a few million dollars, launch and then grow from their own profits, maybe raising very large rounds just to scale distribution, breach 100s of millions in revenue, and go for an IPO? (2) Or will we continue to see the typical Pre-Seed -> Seed -> A -> B -> C -> D -> E -> IPO journeys as the dust settles on AI prototyping and enterprises start measuring ROI on their AI spend? I'm all ears 👂

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Introducing the PULSE Platform page 📊 We've just launched a new dedicated page for PULSE, One Peak's proprietary technology platform that's transforming how we invest in and support software scale-ups. PULSE tracks billions of data points across the global software market, giving us an unparalleled view of market momentum. From AI-powered deal sourcing and automated due diligence to TaaS (our talent matching engine with 800m+ profiles), PULSE drives differentiation across our entire investment lifecycle. But it's not just for us. Portfolio companies get self-serve access to market mapping, competitor intelligence, network analysis, talent identification and more, scalable expertise when they need it most. We’re proud of the work the team has done to bring this to life, and excited to share this tool with our network. Take a look here: https://lnkd.in/ePmvSYAE #data #insights #softwaremarket #pulse #onepeak #AI

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Thrilled to announce our investment in CtrlB! Privilege partnering with founders like Adarsh, who are deeply obsessed with the problem they’re solving - a true force of nature. CtrlB is redefining enterprise observability, building a next-gen telemetry engine that makes search up to 10x faster and 90% cheaper. In an era where enterprises generate terabytes of data every day, CtrlB is closing the gap with a fundamentally new approach to ingesting, indexing, and querying petabyte-scale data - enabling teams to gain real-time visibility without trade-offs between cost and speed. #funding #startups

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Flowla Raises $2.5 Million in Seed Round Flowla, a London, UK-based platform developing AI-assisted automation for sales and customer success teams, has raised $2.5 million in Seed funding. #AI #Automation #Sales #CustomerSuccess #RevenueOperations #SaaS #WorkflowAutomation #SeedRound #Funding https://lnkd.in/gUyvbVct

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