What's 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #249

🤯 Enterprise on 🔥 with no end in sight - big rounds, earnings + more on Superhuman journey, bespoke onboarding to bespoke Series C

Aug 7

We just finished another insane week for enterprise software and the world of VC. On the funding front some of the big ones that got my attention were Hopin which raised at $7.5B and Dataiku which raised at $4.6B. On the public side, Datadog’s stock popped over 15% as it crushed its Q2 numbers and now has a $40B+ market cap. There seems to be no end in sight and as many of the largest corporations like Amazon delay office openings to January, expect more of a boost for the ☁️ in the coming months.

If you’ve been reading my newsletter for awhile, my themes are quite consistent - patience required when creating new categories and building a community and new product takes time. Last week I shared the 6 year journey with Replicated since our investment at company formation and its creation of modern on-prem software. This week, Superhuman, announced its carefully curated $75M Series C round, and I thought it appropriate to share learnings from the 6 years since we wrote the first check there.

First let’s start with the vision and our initial investment memo:

Ed Sim @edsim

@rahulvohra @Boldstartvc @firstround 🙏🏼 just for kicks, reminded me to look back at our memo from 2014 - key risks - not being able to build a world class product ✅, not being able to get users to pay ✅, not being able to cost effectively get distribution ✅ - 😃

And here’s the first mockup which Rahul showed Eliot and I along with my daughter:

Ed Sim @edsim

@rahulvohra that was a fun day + she mostly says No 😃 - what I ❤️most + I like to tell all of our pre-product founders is show us what the future will look like, put a mockup together - remember this? Still similar in format but obviously so much under the hood for 100ms or less and scale

6 years later and the company is still on the same mission: to make people brilliant at what they do with a focus on the 1 billion professionals in the world who on average spend 3 hours a day in email. More here from Rahul’s post on the round and here’s Forbes coverage as well.

Since then, Superhuman customers have sent over 100 million messages, triaged over 335 million conversations, and used over 1 billion keyboard shortcuts. Together, they have saved tens of millions of hours.

Co-founder Vivek Sodera shares the thoughtfulness in how they crafted the round which was led by IVP and in particular Ajay Vashee who was formerly CFO of Dropbox as it scaled from $50M ARR to $2B ARR (read 🧵)

Vivek Sodera @vsodera

Excited to finally announce @Superhuman raised a $75m Series C on an $825M valuation, led by @IVP. ‘Be Intentional’ is one of our core values and we were very, very intentional about who and the mechanics of the fundraise.👇🏼 1/5

Alex Konrad @alexrkonrad

News: startup Superhuman has raised $75 million ahead of its email app coming to Android and Outlook users. I spoke to CEO @rahulvohra about bringing on investors like @drewhouston, @ariannahuff and @aplusk, and the future of his still waitlist-only app. https://t.co/fgRxYQqoS1

All I can say is many times people discounted Superhuman, whether or not you could build faster email, charge people $29 for it, build a massive business on the backs of Google Apps and ios alone (new funding for outlook 365/android and more), and whether its bespoke onboarding for each new user would work. Finally folks questioned the ability to build a sizable business with single player mode - the book is still being written but founders don’t let the naysayers keep you down as I’m looking forward to even bigger things ahead at Superhuman.

As always, 🙏🏼 for reading and please share with your friends and colleagues!

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Pitchbook article from Monday lays out why ‘solo VCs’ for many founders and WSJ from the weekend shows the increasing 💰 from hedge funds and mutual funds.