It’s a big day for funding announcements here at Foundry. This morning we announced that we led a $5M financing into Pantheon to help them extend their leadership in hosted Drupal (see that post here). Fast forward a few hours and we’re also today announcing our investment in ecommerce analytics and marketing platform, Jirafe.The Jirafe platform helps retailers make better use of their marketing budgets, drive better inventory and merchandizing decisions, and gain better insights into their online sales funnel. That’s a longer way of saying that Jirafe helps online retailers make more money, something that we believe every ecommerce vendor is looking to do!
For a long time we’ve been strong believers in the power of analytics (and have a history of investing in companies that have analytics as a significant part of their product offering). The first step to improving any process is to understand as thoroughly as possible what is working and what isn’t. This is both especially true and especially challenging in ecommerce, where small changes can have major effects, but where tracking marketing to sales efficiencies can be extremely difficult. We believe that the intersection of commerce and marketing offers a huge opportunity for Jirafe to build a substantial business while helping online retailers grow more efficient and profitable (not to mention larger) through better understanding their commerce sales efficiency and making changes up and down this sales funnel to improve overall results.
Jirafe is led by Amit Shah and Scott Switzer, who both have a deep background in marketing, advertising and ecommerce (together they were part of the founding team of OpenX, and Amit ran sales and business development for ecommerce vendor Magento). We led this financing with FirstMark Capital with participation from OATV and FirstRound Capital. While we’ve been longtime friends with the team at FirstMark, this is our first investment together.
It’s an exciting time in the very quickly growing online commerce market. We’re looking forward to working with Amit, Scott and the rest of the team at Jirafe to help growth that market even faster and create a great business in the process.
Our Investment In Pantheon
Today we are pleased to announce that we’ve led a $5M Series A investment in Pantheon, a cloud service for developing, deploying and scaling enterprise websites built upon the Drupal open-source content management platform. Check out the company’s blog post and also Venture Beat and PE Hub, who have covered today’s funding announcement.
The emergence of SaaS as a delivery model for enterprise software over the past decade has transformed the enterprise software industry, disrupting incumbents and creating billion-dollar-plus market-cap pure-play SaaS companies such as Salesforce, Concur, Netsuite and RightNow.
While many traditional enterprise software verticals (CRM, expense management, customer service) have made the transition to true SaaS platforms, web content management system software has not yet made the transition to a true multi-tenant scalable SaaS model. Traditional content management system vendors like OpenText, Documentum, FileNet, Hummingbird and Vignette have all been consolidated by large players like EMC and IBM and do not have true SaaS offerings.
Two widely adopted open-source web publishing and CMS platforms have emerged over the past several years: WordPress and Drupal. WordPress is widely deployed by bloggers and small-scale publishers, while Drupal is favored by larger scale sites that required higher degrees of scalability, customization and more advanced publishing and workflow features typical of more sophisticated CMS platforms.
The Drupal core has been downloaded several million times and is used by over 7.2 million websites as of July 2010, including high-profile governmental deployments like whitehouse.gov and data.gov.uk and large-scale publishers like Economist.com.
The thriving Drupal ecosystem and the role that Pantheon’s founders play in the Drupal open-source community were among the key factors that attracted us to Pantheon, as did their growing customer base which includes NBC Universal, AAA and UC Berkeley.
While Drupal has made much headway in making large-scale, sophisticated websites easier to build and manage, many complexities remain when it comes to deployment, management and scaling of websites. Operationalizing a website at scale is non-trivial and most IT departments lack the knowledge or personnel resources to do so effectively.
Pantheon makes this simple: developers can sign up for free and have access to best-in-class development, management and deployment tools running to build sites running on a platform that is highly optimized and horizontally scalable. Website developers can focus on building sites instead of managing infrastructure.
We are looking forward to working with David, Zack, Matt, Josh, and the rest of the Pantheon team!
Singly App Challenge
Recently, our portfolio company Singly held a hackathon called the Singly App Challenge to mark the official launch of the Singly platform. The event was a great success: there was a strong turnout, some amazing apps were built in just 48 hours, and the winning team walked away with a $10,000 prize. Singly plans to host more of these in the future, so stay tuned!
Foundry Group Beer!
Today we are releasing our first batch of Foundry Group beer: the Liquidation Preference Spring Equinox Ale. As many of you know, we are serious beer nerds at Foundry Group – if you need further proof, check out Ryan’s photolog of the beers he’s enjoyed over the years. Way back in the stone ages of the early 90s, Ryan even used to brew his own beer.
We decided that a cool perk for our LPs, portfolio company founders and CEOs and would be to create a batch of Foundry Group beer and send these members of the Foundry Group family a 22oz bomber of beer.
So we teamed up with TechStars and Foundry Group portfolio alum Matt Galligan (and serious home brewer) to brew and bottle a batch of beer at his home in San Francisco. Consider this our first foray into the world of biotech – yeast fermentation is of course the first example of humans harnessing the power of biotechnology.
We hope folks enjoy it! See below for a cool video Matt put together of the brewing process, just to verify that only yeast, hops and barley we harmed during the process.
Today Datahero announced that Foundry Group has led the company’s seed round, and we are joined by a great set of co-investors including Neu Venture Capital, former Mark Logic CEO Dave Kellogg and analytics experts and LinkedIn alums Mike Greenfield and Jonathan Goldman.
Datahero was founded with the goal of bringing powerful data analytics and visualization to everyone, allowing anyone to understand the data that matter to them. The founders are Big Data veteran Chris Neumann and user experience expert Jeff Zabel. Chris was the first hire at Aster Data, a Big Data company from before the term was coined. Jeff Zabel spent many years at BMW’s Palo Alto offices and was a driving force behind the company’s iPhone/Android phone integration projects and the award-winning Google Maps send-to-my-car feature.
We were originally connected with the founders in late 2011 by Gnip CEO Jud Valeski, when they were heads-down building a prototype/alpha version of their product. Jeff and Chris huddled up and spent the next few months building an early version of the product, and when we reconnected in the spring of 2012, we were mightily impressed by what just two guys had built over a few short months.
We share Datahero’s belief that current data analysis business intelligence tools have far too steep a learning curve to be accessible to the average user and often require IT staff involvement and the help of a data scientist before any real insight can be unlocked. Given the explosion of data sources available online from the broad universe of SaaS apps, and the broad trend towards the consumerization of IT, we think Datahero’s vision will bring sophisticated data analysis capabilities to a much broader audience than today’s tools allow.
We welcome Datahero to the Foundry Group portfolio and look forward to working with Chris and Jeff to build a great company.
