We’re excited to share that Scaleworks Venture Finance is now Element SaaS Finance! Element provides flexible loans to growing SaaS companies based on their asset of recurring revenue.
We’re excited to announce that Scaleworks has made its second acquisition from Fund II. Joining the family is a leader in e-commerce search technology, with specific expertise in real-time recommendation and personalization, Nextopia.
If you’re a SaaS business — you’re likely overwhelmed with data and an ever growing list of acronyms that purport to unlock secret keys to your success.
Scaleworks is excited to announce today that we’ve acquired SearchSpring, a company that provides access to advanced searching for online retailers' websites. This acquisition is the first for Fund II, which we announced this past February.
As an avid follower of innovation (in all industries) and having worked and studied Finance for the last twenty years, the rise of challengers to the finance and banking industry is met with open arms.
A group of Product Managers just co-authored what sounds like an interesting book, called ‘Launch’. But I doubt it will get the readership it may deserve.
We’re excited to share with you today that three years after we opened up the doors at Scaleworks, we’ve raised our second equity fund.
The outcomes someone who is good at focussing, and knows what to focus on, can generate far outweigh the horsepower of their input. In fact, input effort isn’t really a good predicator of success at all.
We’re scrappy at Scaleworks. The fund has a small team and we wear many hats. I didn’t blink when asked to provide support for the applicant tracking system (ATS) used by our portfolio companies.
Scrappy business people are fantastic people to work with — lean, mean, execution machines. But there comes a point where all scrap and no strategy results in a hard working team that are running to stand-still.
For the last few years, angel and venture capital investors in technology have been biased away from non-technical founders. Entrepreneurs would hear things like: “If you’re not an engineer — find one to be your co-founder” or “If you’re not a developer — become one”.
I know this headline is going to get a chuckle around my office. A couple of weeks ago I was interviewed and the journalist started with “I believe you’re the metrics and data driven guy here”. I don’t think that’s the case, but perception is reality, so this opinion is likely to seem as a reversal on my part.
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🔧 For a while, many venture investors avoided vertical software because they felt its comparatively small markets would not produce target VC outcomes. That has of course changed in recent years, and CRV does a nice job of outlining why. They use the example of auto repair software – with 167k auto repair shops in the US and the lower priced players charging $2.7k a year, you conservatively have a ~$440M TAM (not the $1B+ venture gets excited about). But over time these software are able to further specialize and innovate within their verticals, both creating more solutions (more things to charge for) and improving their current offerings (giving them the ability to charge more), thus growing their TAM. What CRV is most excited about in vertical software is embedded commerce. Using the same example, embedded commerce would be selling auto parts directly through auto repair software, putting your website, booking system, POS, etc. all in one place.
