As a sales leader, COVID-19 has introduced many new challenges. From prospecting strategy to outreach, our team is making changes across the board to ensure we’re targeting the right prospects, at the right time, in an effective and situation-conscious way.
This strategy includes closely following industry trends and keeping a pulse on which industries are being negatively, or positively, impacted by COVID-19. This means that paying close attention to growth signals is more important than ever.
In “The Monthly Rundown” series, I dive into a few up-and-coming startups from the past month, filtering by recent funding rounds and significant influxes of new website visitors.
Without further ado, here is my list of 5 startups to watch (March 2020 edition):
1. Finix
HQ: San Francisco, California
Industry: Fintech, E-Commerce, Payments
Funding: Recently raised a $10M Series B on March 9. Lead Investor: Inspired Capital Partners
Web traffic: 133% monthly visits growth
Why I’m watching Finix: “Payments Infrastructure-as-a-service” is a hot new market, where SaaS businesses, independent software vendors (ISVs) and marketplaces are looking to decrease their outsourced payments and bring them in-house. Finix gives businesses a way to own, manage and monetize their entire payments experience without building an in-house system, which can take up to 2-3 years to build, not to mention hundreds of thousands of dollars. Fintech as a sector has seen immense growth over the last decade, and I suspect this trend will continue as payments in all forms become increasingly digitized.
2. Humio
HQ: London, England, U.K.
Industry: Data Center Automation, Real Time, Software
Funding: Recently raised $20M Series B on March 25. Lead Investor: Dell Technologies
Web traffic: 64% monthly visits growth
Why I’m watching Humio: A time-series logging and aggregation platform, Humio is designed to instantly process massive amounts of log data–essentially data documenting events that occur within a program or platform. Humio enables companies to explore, report and analyze data from a range of sources, faster. A recent 6x increase in revenue caught the attention of Dell Technologies Capital, which led Humio’s latest Series B round in late March. It’s no secret that real-time software analytics tools will continue to be top of mind for investors as software companies require faster event analysis while also demanding the interpretation of more data.
3. Everlaw
HQ: Oakland, California
Industry: Document Management, Ediscovery, Legal
Funding: Recently raised $62M Series C. Lead Investors: CapitalG, Menlo Ventures
Web traffic: 53% monthly visits growth
Why I’m watching Everlaw: While some legal departments still prefer pen and paper, the digital wave of innovation is well on its way to transforming their workplaces. Everlaw helps legal professionals discover documents quicker and easier, with the ultimate goal of allowing them to investigate issues more thoroughly, uncover truth more quickly, and present their findings more clearly. Automation is no longer a stranger to any industry, and Everlaw is ensuring legal departments are on board.
4. Electric.ai
HQ: New York, New York
Industry: Information Technology, Technical Support, Network Security
Funding: Recently raised $14.5M Series B on March 10. Lead Investor: 01 Advisors
Web traffic: 47% monthly visits growth
Why I’m watching Electric.ai: Offering tech support on steroids, Electric.ai claims to deliver answers to its customer’s pain points in less than 10 minutes. Woah. It’s no wonder Electric.ai caught the attention of 01 Advisors. For companies that are now navigating work in a remote world, streamlined management of IT security, support and devices is crucial to success–and I bet IT teams can agree that this support is certainly welcome.
5. Ada Support
HQ: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Industry: Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Systems, Customer Service
Funding: Recently raised a $44M Series B on March 19. Lead Investor: Accel
Web traffic: 24% monthly visits growth
Why I’m watching Ada Support: If uncertain times make anything clear, it’s the need for high-quality, and high-capacity, customer support. Ada Support is out to change the customer support game with a chatbot designed to automate processes and deliver increased CSAT (customer satisfaction) scores by empowering users to answer questions on their own, freeing support teams to have more meaningful conversations with them.
What else would you like to see? Shoot me a note: shamus@crunchbase.com
– Shamus
Shamus Noonan is a sales manager at Crunchbase, where he leads a team of AEs & SDRs across inbound and outbound channels. Find him on LinkedIn.
