Our investment in Allica: Full-suite SME banking that customers love

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Financial services is one of the largest industries on the planet, making up several trillions of dollars of annual revenues. Despite its outsized importance in the global economy, the industry is dominated by incumbents that struggle to innovate, weighed down by legacy tech, heavily manual processes, and costly physical branch networks. As a result, customer experience is consistently poor, cumbersome and frustrating. Tech-enabled products and services have made other facets of consumers’ lives easier and frictionless and they’re hungry for financial products that do the same. This has opened the door for tech-forward, customer-first challengers across the financial services industry.

Over the last five-plus years, we’ve doubled down on this opportunity with two specific focus areas: Digital Banking and SME Financial Operations Tools, and have been fortunate to partner with the likes of Revolut, Nubank, Brex, Qonto, Toast, Xero, and Razorpay. While each of these companies is disrupting different segments of financial services in its own specific way, each has benefitted from tailwinds associated with these two macro themes. The worlds of technology and finance continue to merge, with SaaS companies extending into payments and lending like Toast and Xero, and with banks being built from scratch underpinned by a modern, unified technological core and an obsessive approach to product experience like Revolut, Nubank, Qonto – and now Allica.

The underserved middle

We believe Allica is the only digitally-native UK bank that is building out a full-suite offering – inclusive of commercial mortgages, asset financing, savings accounts, current accounts and more – for the underserved middle of the “established SME” segment. Established SMEs are businesses that have 10-250 employees, a segment that we estimate to represent roughly one-third of the UK economy.1 These established SMEs sit awkwardly between mass market businesses – retail and micro-SMEs – who can get by with relatively simple, automated banking self-services, and large corporate entities that banks service manually given their high revenue potential.

In contrast, lending to established SMEs combines high complexity – they have a wide range of legal entity structures, shareholders, security types, loan features, etc. – with high volume and lower ticket sizes. Credit is mission-critical to these businesses, yet incumbents fail to serve the segment adequately because of slow, manual and legacy technology and processes. Other fintechs haven’t entered the segment because they lack domain expertise. The result is many credit-worthy SMEs are unable to secure loans in a timely fashion, or at all. There is a gaping need for a bank that can deliver mass-customisation combined with great customer experience at low marginal cost.

Enter Allica and its proprietary, cloud-native banking platform that is specifically suited to handle the complexity associated with established SMEs. Allica’s platform digitizes and automates many components of the end-to-end lending journey, which drives significant operational efficiency and enables best-in-class decision turnaround times, a deeply valuable proposition to SMEs and the growing UK broker community. We are excited to support Allica’s ambition to build a full suite of modern financial products over the coming years. The company’s recent launches of a market-leading business current and savings accounts are the latest steps on this journey.

Allica has shown strong momentum in the three years since being granted a banking license. The bank is profitable and growing quickly: it has surpassed £1 billion in lending to SMEs and its Q3 2022 revenues were up more than 700 percent year-on-year compared to 2021. We believe the opportunity for Allica to be sizable: the total lending flow to UK SMEs is approximately £60 billion a year and in our view Allica has already shown it has better economics than its incumbent competitors we have reviewed, with more room for improvement as the team further digitizes the lending journey. These achievements are a testament to the strength of the product, value proposition to customers, and highly impressive execution.

Our partnership with Allica

We are thrilled to announce that we have led the £100M Series C round of Allica alongside existing investors Warwick Capital Partners and Atalaya Capital Management. We have known the Allica team for many years and couldn’t be more excited to support them and their vision to become the seminal UK SME fintech. We have also worked closely with Allica’s CEO Richard Davies over the last three years at our portfolio companies Revolut and Zepz and are delighted to back him in this partnership. 

We believe Richard has built a talented and dynamic team that shares a collective passion for SMEs, deep expertise in credit, and a track record for building tech products customers love. We believe the team’s collective experience and drive uniquely position them to execute on their ambitious vision for UK SME banking. We can’t wait to roll up our sleeves to support them in turning that vision into reality.

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 1 Source: ONS, UK Finance, Finance and Leasing Association, British Bankers’ Association.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of TCMI, Inc. or its affiliates (“TCV”). TCV has not verified the accuracy of any of the data or statements by the author and disclaims any responsibility therefor. This blog post is not an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to purchase an interest in any private fund managed or sponsored by TCV or any of the securities of any company discussed. The TCV portfolio companies identified above are not necessarily representative of all TCV investments, and no assumption should be made that the investments identified were or will be profitable. For a complete list of TCV investments, please visit www.tcv.com/all-companies/. For additional important disclaimers regarding this interview and blog post, please see “Informational Purposes Only” in the Terms of Use for TCV’s website, available at http://www.tcv.com/terms-of-use/

Our investment in Grow: Behavioral health’s independent practice platform

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The mental healthcare industry in the U.S. is at an inflection point: Patients can’t easily find help while therapists are overworked, underpaid, and frustrated with traditional employment options. Therapists are increasingly dissatisfied with the groups they are employed by and 80% are looking for a new way to engage with patients.

Launching one’s own practice is hard. Self-employed therapists must navigate complex payer relationships to offer in-network coverage, tap channel and referral networks to build their book of patients, manage burdensome administrative work, and cultivate a network of peers for collaboration and support. The industry’s antiquated practices are directly impacting patient outcomes and clinical quality.

Grow’s B2B2C platform enables therapists to launch their own independent practice and in doing so, enables therapists to expand access and better serve patients.

With Grow’s complete ‘practice-in-a-box’ solution, self-employed therapists can offer affordable insurance-covered care to patients without having to worry about patient acquisition, overhead, or other administrative burdens that often fall on independent private operators (e.g. EHR, scheduling, invoicing, payment collection, note taking tools). Grow also provides a community for therapists to engage and connect with other providers in the field. 70%+ of providers use the Grow Community weekly and many cite this feature as a reason for their success on Grow. 

For patients, Grow offers a convenient path to find the right in-network behavioral health provider, book time instantly on their calendar, and access confidential secure care either virtually or in-person. 

Team on a mission.

The idea for Grow came from CEO and Co-Founder Jake Cooper’s experience with the difficulties of finding in-network behavioral care. After many dead-ends, Jake decided to pay out-of-pocket for a provider not covered by his insurance. While he had the resources to tap a provider out-of-network, Jake knew most Americans did not.   

Jake partnered with co-founders Alan Ni and Manoj Kanagaraj, as well as a broader team with deep experience across technology, healthcare, and payments, to build a mission driven company which empowers therapists to launch their own independent practices that are: 1) covered by the largest number of insurance providers in the industry, 2) easily discoverable by patients, and 3) scalable due to full-stack supporting infrastructure. 

Our partnership with Grow.

We’re thrilled to announce that TCV has led Grow’s Series B. In this round, Grow has raised $75M in equity and debt capital from TCV and other leading investors including Signalfire and Transformation Capital.

At TCV, we look to partner with founders who are building category-defining, generational companies and we’re incredibly excited to partner with Jake, Alan, Manoj, and the rest of the Grow team on their mission to create the largest and most accessible behavioral health platform in the country. 

Machine learning observability built for practitioners: Our investment in Arize

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We’re still in the early innings of AI adoption, yet we’ve already seen it transform industries. Companies like Netflix, Spotify, and Uber have scaled internal teams from a handful of data scientists and machine learning (ML) engineers to hundreds. These teams, and the models they built to inform business and product decision-making, have shaped how consumers watch television, listen to music, and hail rides.

As AI use cases abound, ML teams face growing challenges around how to build, deploy, and maintain their models. Practitioners demand the flexibility to optimize each component of a model and, like software development, use specific tools to address the various phases of the model development lifecycle. In an attempt to bridge the development gap in ML, a new framework called MLOps has emerged. MLOps is derived from core DevOps principles and represents one of the fastest growing markets in technology today. 

To date, MLOps has largely centered on data preparation, model training, and model deployment; however, building and deploying models is only the beginning of the journey. What happens once a model is running in production? The reality is most companies still lack the necessary tools to scalably monitor and understand their live models. Moreover, as these models become more complex, troubleshooting issues gets harder and both upstream and downstream problems compound. 

In order for AI to achieve long-term sustainability, companies must improve model transparency, understanding, and performance. Enter Arize, a ML observability platform built by practitioners to help unpack the proverbial AI black box and optimize the performance of models in production. 

Shaping the future of AI infrastructure

As the various components of the model lifecycle standardize, many companies have started to orient away from expensive in-house builds and less flexible integrated platforms. Instead, practitioners are opting for best-of-breed MLOps solutions from focused vendors like Arize to gain additional control over their modeling workflow.

Arize sets itself apart as one of the few platforms that sits at the center of production ML. Within MLOps, there has been a flood of investment in tools addressing data preparation all the way through to the model deployment stage, but few tackle the reality that all live models face over time: degradation. Without real-time monitoring and observability, ML teams spend countless hours pouring over anomalies and trying to understand problems in the data, software, and / or model itself. Arize’s observability platform seamlessly plugs into any MLOps stack and provides a scalable solution to monitor the performance of models, explain what the models are trying to do, and diagnose data and drift issues without going back to square one.

In speaking to Arize’s customers, which include many of the world’s most sophisticated ML teams, it’s clear observability is seen as a core pillar of AI infrastructure and represents a natural progression in how they think about model lifecycle management. There’s a reason adjacent observability solutions like Datadog and Monte Carlo exist in other areas of IT, and we believe ML will be no different. 

Built by practitioners

Arize’s founders, Jason Lopatecki and Aparna Dhinakaran, first met at TubeMogul, where Jason was a founder who helped build out the company’s ML team and Aparna was a data scientist. Jason would eventually guide TubeMogul through a successful IPO and sale to Adobe while Aparna went to work for Uber as part of its famed Michelangelo team. 

Jason and Aparna stand out in a MLOps space where many founders hail from academia. Both draw from deep practitioner roots and have experienced firsthand the heartache of spending months building and training models, deploying them to production, and having no insight into how the models actually performed once deployed. Independently, they came to the conclusion that something was fundamentally missing in the MLOps toolchain. Together, they are now focused on bringing transparency, understanding, and performance to production ML through Arize’s dedicated observability platform. 

Our partnership with Arize

We’re thrilled to announce that TCV has led Arize’s $38M Series B alongside our friends at Battery Ventures, Foundation Capital, and Swift Ventures. 
At TCV, we gravitate towards founders that are culture and product obsessed. Jason and Aparna blend multi-stage company-building experience with firsthand knowledge of a real customer pain point. We’re incredibly excited to partner with the Arize team on their mission to make AI work and work for the people. If you are interested in joining Arize for the journey ahead, please visit their website to learn more about current career opportunities.

Empowering physicians with AI to improve patient outcomes: Our investment in Aidoc

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For investors deeply passionate about healthcare, there is no dearth of excitement and inspiration in contemporary times. Specifically, we are now seeing modern technology platforms being developed on the back of transformative progress in computer vision, computational technologies and methods, and the ability for systems to interconnect, in addition to sophisticated data modeling capabilities, among others. This innovation has served as the foundation for a new generation of healthcare software companies to take on massive industry challenges, including high-impact areas such as democratizing patient access, improving the quality of care, reducing drug discovery and development timelines, enabling frictionless payment and collections, and driving efficiencies in business processes and operational workflows. Aidoc is one such healthcare technology company with a vision to be the intelligence layer for medical imaging diagnostics and care coordination.  

Aidoc was founded in 2016 by CEO Elad Walach, CTO Michael Braginsky, VP of R&D Guy Reiner and CMO Gal Yaniv who met while serving in the Israeli Defense Force’s Talpiot program, an elite technology program focused on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) research. The company’s platform consists of 20 medical applications, including 15 FDA-cleared algorithms, designed to drive speed, efficiency, and accuracy of diagnosis in medical imaging and multidisciplinary coordination of care in the context of more complex episodes – stroke and pulmonary emboli, specifically. 

Medical imaging represents a massive component of overall healthcare spend – the U.S. spends approximately $118 billion on imaging services annually, and expenditures are projected to grow approximately 7% per year for the foreseeable future. For complex patient cases, clinical personnel across multiple medical specialties must be engaged in order to determine the appropriate treatment. Historically, this coordination of care across stakeholders has proven challenging, lacked systemization, and been performed largely via offline methods. As healthcare providers have introduced more multidisciplinary programs and increasingly look to standardize the provision of care across them, technologies that enable care coordination and provider collaboration across specialties have become increasingly important.

Aidoc’s mission is to leverage AI and workflow software to drive multidisciplinary care coordination and deliver the right diagnosis, at the right time, to the right physician. To that end, Aidoc has developed a technology platform that applies the company’s 15 FDA-cleared algorithms – with many more on the way – to a radiologist’s queue in order to prioritize and triage patient cases. Further, the company’s growing repository of millions of annotated medical images is used to continually improve its algorithms over time. Importantly, Aidoc’s AI is “always on,” and the platform applies the company’s algorithms to every case simultaneously, allowing cases in more urgent need of intervention to be elevated for review regardless of where they fall in the queue. Following triage and diagnosis, Aidoc’s software also enables clinical personnel to coordinate the downstream provision of care by facilitating information sharing and communication across multiple stakeholders. Finally, and perhaps most impressively, the company’s platform integrates seamlessly within the existing operational workflows and clinical protocols of its customers.

Aidoc’s customers include a number of large health systems in the U.S., including HCA, Northwell Health, The Mayo Clinic, and Cedars-Sinai. The company also has a meaningful presence internationally, with customers that include Antwerp University Hospital, Netherlands Cancer Institute, Sheba Medical Center, and Alfred Health, among others. Finally, Aidoc also has partner relationships with leading radiology service providers, including Radiology Partners and Everlight Radiology.

The company’s customers derive value from Aidoc’s platform in terms of: a) increased diagnostic efficiency, b) improved prioritization and triage of the most complex or urgent cases, c) higher-quality diagnoses and reduced diagnostic error-rates, and d) more systematized, streamlined coordination of patient care. The company’s compelling value proposition, coupled with its reputation for high-velocity, relentless innovation and above-and-beyond customer delivery and support, has engendered customer delight. As evidence, Aidoc boasts an average net promoter score of between 80 and 90. 

TCV’s healthcare team has spent the last several quarters prioritizing companies that provide AI technology across various applications for the healthcare industry. Most recently, this focus led to our investments in BenchSci, a provider of AI software for driving productivity in preclinical research for the life sciences industry, and Syllable, a provider of AI technology for provider business process automation (and soon payor and other healthcare sub-sectors). 

Our Series D investment in Aidoc, completed in partnership with our friends at Alpha Intelligence Capital, General Catalyst, Square Peg Capital, and Emerge Ventures, represents another illustration of our thesis, this time for diagnostic and care coordination use cases. The Series D funding is intended to help Aidoc expand the company’s AI and ML software platform into additional applications, rapidly scale headcount, and forward invest in future growth initiatives. We are particularly excited about Elad’s vision for both the business and future of patient care, in addition to the company’s recent momentum that has established Aidoc as an emerging leader in the category. Elad has also lined-up an impressive team of advisors and experts to advise the company, including TCV Venture Partner Anita Pramoda.

“Of the various AI and ML use cases in healthcare, Aidoc’s is the one that I’m particularly excited about – their technology immediately improves patient outcomes and drives efficiencies for clinical personnel,” says Anita Pramoda, TCV Venture Partner. “Exponential patient and provider value will continue to be realized as Elad and the team roll out new algorithms, software applications, and integrations. In the future, instant diagnosis of conditions will transform patient care as we know it, and most importantly, save lives.”

Value proposition and momentum notwithstanding, what also impressed us is the humble, high-learning, and customer-centric culture Elad and his team have developed that permeates throughout the organization. Starting with Elad, it was clear during our diligence that the Aidoc team is mission-driven and firmly committed to using their team members’ talents to develop technology that improves patient outcomes through AI-driven care coordination. The results speak for themselves – Aidoc is a top-ranked employer on Glassdoor.

“With healthcare institutions facing labor shortages and navigating difficult economic situations, the future is predicated on value-based care that is enabled by automation technologies like AI and ML,” says Aidoc CEO Elad Walach. “But AI and ML are not enough in singular use cases – they must be applied across the entirety of a healthcare enterprise in order to deliver value-based care to the extent that would make a deep impact – an intelligence layer covering the entire patient lifecycle. That’s where we believe our AI Care Platform will transform healthcare. Partnering with TCV – a team that truly understands the importance of value-based care – gives us the support we need to manifest our vision.”

We are off to the races in our partnership with Elad and the Aidoc team, and are incredibly excited to help build a category-defining, generational software company that helps improve patient outcomes through AI-driven care coordination.

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The views and opinions expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect those of TCMI, Inc. or its affiliates (“TCV”). TCV has not verified the accuracy of any statements by the speakers and disclaims any responsibility therefor. This blog post is not an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to purchase an interest in any private fund managed or sponsored by TCV or any of the securities of any company discussed. The TCV portfolio companies identified, if any, are not necessarily representative of all TCV investments, and no assumption should be made that the investments identified were or will be profitable. For a complete list of TCV investments, please visit www.tcv.com/all-companies/. For additional important disclaimers regarding this interview and blog post, please see “Informational Purposes Only” in the Terms of Use for TCV’s website, available at http://www.tcv.com/terms-of-use/

Improving the patient experience with AI/ML software: Our investment in Syllable

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Digitization of healthcare provider business processes and workflows is one of our healthcare team’s key investment themes. Our focus on this theme is a derivative of several industry dynamics affecting hospitals and physician practices, including reimbursement headwinds that are pressuring already slim operating profit margins, workforce shortages and high employee turnover, and a reliance on manual, labor-intensive, and / or paper-based methods to facilitate key business processes, among others. Put simply, across front, middle, and back office applications, we believe healthcare providers will increasingly adopt automation software to drive operational and financial efficiencies, increase workforce productivity, improve employee retention, reduce burnout of clinical personnel, and, perhaps most importantly, improve the patient experience.

In baseball terms, we believe the healthcare industry is in the “early innings” with regard to software adoption. While provider organizations have spent the last 10-15 years adopting electronic medical records (EMRs), they continue to lag other verticals in terms of software adoption for managing and / or automating various business processes. As one example, healthcare providers have only recently begun implementing customer relationship management (CRM) software platforms, while most other industries have had CRM systems for decades. To this juncture, automation software (often termed “robotic process automation” or “RPA”) adoption in healthcare has largely focused on back office applications – revenue cycle, specifically. However, we believe automation of front-office workflows through technology – healthcare’s “digital front door” – will have the most profound impact on the patient experience, while also driving significant operational and financial value for providers.

It is against this backdrop that we are delighted to lead Syllable’s $40M Series C financing in partnership with our friends at Oak HC/FT, Section 32, and Verily Life Sciences. Our investment in Syllable is intended to help Syllable expand its artificial intelligence and machine-learning (AI/ML) enabled software platform into adjacent applications and use cases, penetrate new healthcare customer segments (e.g., payor, pharmacy, etc.), rapidly scale headcount across all functions, and forward invest in future growth initiatives.

There has been a lot of “buzz” recently regarding the healthcare industry’s “digital front door,” which we define as simply the technology-enabled mediums via which patients engage with the healthcare system. This is largely a function of the growing consumerization of healthcare and corresponding emphasis on improving the patient experience, and numerous technologies have emerged to help facilitate digital interactions between patients and providers. Having said that, our research – and data from Syllable’s customers – indicates that the dominant modality for patient engagement with providers remains a telephone call; in our view, this is a derivative of the uniqueness of an individual patient’s circumstances and needs, in addition to the complexity of the healthcare system and its historically limited or non-existant digital channels. As a result, we believe the technology platforms best-positioned to automate front office workflows must offer solutions that address both voice and digital mediums.

Enter Syllable and its CEO, Kobus Jooste. Kobus founded Syllable in 2017 with an initial vision to build a software platform capable of removing high-friction barriers between healthcare providers and their patients. Prior to founding Syllable, Kobus spent several years in engineering leadership roles at Google, the most relevant of which was his leadership of the engineering team that developed and launched Google Assistant. Given Kobus’ background in conversational AI and natural language understanding (NLU), we believe that he is well-positioned to build a platform capable of automating both voice and digital patient-provider interactions. More specifically, Syllable’s technology platform leverages AI and NLU to automate inbound patient interactions with providers via phone, web, chatbot, and SMS text. As 95%+ of all patient interactions with providers presently take place via phone call, healthcare providers invest heavily in call center operations – anecdotally, some of Syllable’s customers field 15M+ patient phone calls per year, and invest hundreds of millions of dollars in their own call center personnel and operations. At the same time, providers are also investing significantly in digital applications to facilitate more efficient patient engagement.

Despite this level of investment, the healthcare industry continues to lag others in terms of consumer (i.e., patient) experience. As one datapoint, healthcare’s average net promoter score (NPS) is approximately 27; an NPS of 50 to 70 is generally considered “good.” As another, healthcare providers have call abandonment rates close to approximately 30% (per data from Syllable’s customers) – one of many reasons underpinning a poor patient experience. For providers, a poor patient experience negatively impacts their revenue from multiple vantages; for example, calls abandoned may represent lost revenue opportunities, and a poor experience with a provider reduces the probability of a repeat visit. Properly and efficiently engaging patients is incredibly challenging, as any digital mechanism for managing interactions needs to be highly approachable for patients, must incorporate healthcare-specific contextualization in terms of the intent of the interaction, requires immense scalability (e.g., large systems have 15M+ inbound phone calls annually), and, to reiterate, must facilitate engagement across both digital and voice channels.

That’s precisely the problem that Syllable is out to solve. Syllable’s technology platform leverages conversational AI and NLU technology in tandem with the company’s purpose-built digital applications to automate inbound patient interactions with healthcare provider organizations. Across the company’s current customer base and use cases, Syllable’s platform is capable of automating the majority of inbound patient inquiries, and those inquiries it cannot drive to a conclusion without human intervention are routed to the customer’s call center personnel for further triage. Common use cases include routing calls to the correct endpoint, appointment scheduling, and referral and medication management, among several others. What’s more – Syllable’s ML technology trains its AI on those interactions it cannot automate such that the company’s automation percentage improves with incremental volume and customer utilization. Syllable’s data suggests that its platform drives hard ROI for customers across multiple dimensions, including a significant reduction in call abandonment rates (to zero with Syllable’s platform) and wait times, a 2x+ or greater increase in first call resolution rates, and higher appointment scheduling conversion rates, among others – all of which result in an improved experience for patients.

Syllable’s compelling value proposition, coupled with its reputation for relentless innovation and top-tier customer service, contributed to engendering customer delight, and the company boasts an NPS of 80+. Its customers include numerous healthcare provider organizations, including Parkview Healthcare, Shannon Healthcare, New York Presbyterian, Weill Cornell Ambulatory Care Network, Houston Methodist, and Mass General-Brigham, among others – a particularly impressive roster given the company only began marketing its platform in October 2021. In 2021, Syllable interacted with 39.7M Americans in text and voice about primary care, specialty referrals, vaccinations, and general practice information. Based on Syllable’s sales momentum, the company will more than double its revenue in 2022, particularly as Syllable scales product and technology resources and continues to add to its go-to-market organization. 

CEO Kobus has assembled an impressive team of advisors and experts to advise Syllable on the healthcare industry’s needs and complexities, in addition to AI and ML technology. With this in mind, we are excited to have TCV Venture Partner Anita Pramoda support Syllable as the company takes-on new challenges in the healthcare industry.

“Syllables compresses the delay between needing and accessing care,” says Anita. “With Syllable, healthcare providers can now bring reliability, repeatability, and ubiquity to access – foundational tenets of good health. I’m honored to partner with Kobus and the entire Syllable team as they scale their platform and offer better care for all patients.”

Growth metrics and accolades aside, what perhaps impresses us most about the Syllable team is its unwavering commitment to approaching the healthcare industry with humility and respect. For a brief anecdote on this front, please refer to this segment with Joe and Syllable’s CMO, Adam Silverman, on a recent episode of the company’s podcast.

“Syllable is at a crucial point in its growth trajectory. As one of the most transformative platforms for health systems, our vision is clear. We want to help as many patients navigate hospital and primary care, while lowering the cost of access to care and the burden on front office staff and clinical staff,” says Kobus.

Syllable was also recognized as a most promising startup in healthcare for 2022 by CB Insights, picked as a leader in the private market from a pool of 7,000 companies – chosen based on R&D activity, proprietary Mosaic scores, market potential, business relationships, investor profile, competitive landscape, team strength, and technology novelty.

We are off to the races in our partnership with the Syllable team – including newly-appointed COO Catherline Krna, who joins Syllable from the Chief Administrative Office of Ambulatory Care and Service Lines at Stanford Health Care. We are incredibly excited to help build what we believe is a category-defining, generational software company that engenders patient delight while driving operational and financial efficiencies for healthcare providers.

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The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of TCMI, Inc. or its affiliates (“TCV”). TCV has not verified the accuracy of any of the data or statements by the author and disclaims any responsibility therefor. This blog post is not an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to purchase an interest in any private fund managed or sponsored by TCV or any of the securities of any company discussed. The TCV portfolio companies identified above are not necessarily representative of all TCV investments, and no assumption should be made that the investments identified were or will be profitable. For a complete list of TCV investments, please visit www.tcv.com/all-companies/. For additional important disclaimers regarding this interview and blog post, please see “Informational Purposes Only” in the Terms of Use for TCV’s website, available at http://www.tcv.com/terms-of-use/.

TCV invests in Evisort to deliver scalable, AI-powered contract management

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Contracts are at the heart of business, enshrining a company’s rights and obligations across areas ranging from sales transactions and supplier relationships to employment agreements and beyond. Resulting from this centrality, rising contract volumes and legal complexity have made contract management unmanageable without leveraging technology.

Evisort delivers end-to-end contract intelligence software that turns contracts into data. Customers use a simple, intuitive interface to extract critical context from contracts, integrate that data into other enterprise systems, and automate a wide range of legal and operational workflows – themselves codified in contract data. Evisort’s platform is powered by award-winning AI that is purpose-built for contracts and trained on over 10 million documents, thereby driving a differentiated customer experience and rapid, tangible ROI.

We are thrilled to announce TCV’s Series C investment in Evisort. We believe that contracts have been both an under-managed source of risk and under-explored source of value for companies, and that Evisort’s AI-powered Contract Intelligence Platform solves increasingly important pain points for businesses of all sizes, ranging from the Fortune 500 to mid-sized companies alike.

Evisort was founded in 2016 by lawyers and technologists who saw the need for automation in contract management.  The platform started as an intelligent analytics engine that extracts clauses and metadata to index contracts and their contents, making them easily searchable and manageable without manual data entry. Evisort’s AI further contextualizes the contract, indicating what type of contract it is, identifying counter-parties, flagging auto-renewal dates, and more.

More recently, Evisort has been adding workflow capabilities – relevant for coordinating contracting processes and operational workflows across the business. Evisort’s end-to-end approach ensures that all contract data is located in one repository, minimizing security risks, reducing the number of required integrations, and allowing the system to apply learnings from previous contracts to new ones.

More than any other contract management software business we’ve evaluated, Evisort’s AI platform supports a wider range of teams, industries, and use cases. Sales teams use Evisort to drive sales and renewals by reducing contracting friction and speeding time to agreement and revenue recognition. Legal departments use Evisort to drive compliance, quickly find and report on critical information, and act as a single source of truth. Procurement and sourcing organizations rely on Evisort to accelerate purchases, negotiate stronger agreements, and manage supplier risks more effectively. In all cases, Evisort drives efficiency by reducing reliance on manual legal review – a major bottleneck in many contracting processes.

Transforming the future of contract management

Evisort’s Contract Intelligence Platform has three main capabilities:

AI-Powered Contract Analytics and Insights: Evisort extracts data from contracts, produces critical insights, and reports on those insights in an easy-to-use dashboard, so that users can focus on higher value tasks. This contract intelligence is then used to generate workflows across the organization. Evisort is focused on delivering the intelligence layer between core operating systems such as customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning platforms.

Intelligent Contract Lifecycle Management: Evisort provides contract request intake, contract drafting, approvals, version control, and repository (storage, search, reporting) features. Evisort’s platform creates a source of truth so teams can centralize knowledge, collaborate easily, and simplify contract administration.

Central Contract Repository and Integrations: Evisort’s no-code platform lets legal, sales, and procurement teams self-serve, taking the burden off of IT teams and providing immediate configurability. Evisort easily integrates into existing systems to minimize the need for data migration and accelerates deployment because employees can work from the systems they already use.

Why now: A big market waiting for the right end-to-end product

At TCV, we have invested extensively behind the digitization of the legal industry – having backed innovative legal technology industry leaders such as Clio, LegalZoom, and Avvo. As part of our work in this space, we have been closely following the evolution of the CLM market for nearly a decade. In that time, customers consistently indicated a desire to manage both new and existing contracts in the same place – in other words, a true end-to-end platform. Over the last several years, our conversations in the space increasingly indicated that Evisort’s founders Jerry, Jake, and Amine had built exactly that and Evisort’s platform was seeing accelerating adoption in a largely greenfield market.

Evisort customers – which include our portfolio companies such as Netflix – typically start with analytics use cases to understand existing contracts, and then add pre-signature workflow to more efficiently generate new contracts. From there, thanks in part to Evisort’s ease of use, usage often quickly expands to additional teams and stakeholders within their organization. For customers, the results are industry-leading time-to-value, implementation speeds, self-service analytics, and flexibility to apply contract-based insights to a wide range of business functions. For Evisort, a cohesive and forward-thinking strategy appears to have translated into an innovative and fast growing company in an exciting market.

Looking Forward

As we look to the future, we are incredibly excited about the tailwinds strengthening Evisort’s value proposition for its customers. Businesses of all sizes have more contracts and a greater need to manage them than ever before. The compliance and regulatory environment also continues to evolve, requiring businesses to maintain constant visibility into their contract corpus. And companies are increasingly leveraging the data embedded in contracts to drive business processes across sales, procurement, operations, and finance.

Given that robust backdrop, we are incredibly excited to work with Jerry, Jake, Amine and the rest of the Evisort team to maximize the opportunity for AI applications in contract management.

 

Safeguarding the modern software supply chain: Legit Security

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Software development is a $2 trillion industry – yet today’s “software supply chains” have become increasingly challenging to govern and secure as agile development practices have evolved in the modern cloud era. Legit Security, a recent addition to TCV’s portfolio family, is on a mission to change that by providing end-to-end governance and security throughout the entirety of the software development lifecycle. 

Software now plays an important role in nearly every business; it is one of the most critical assets empowering organizations to create efficiencies and competitive differentiation. Software development practices are constantly evolving to improve business agility and enable new digital business models, but as a result, software supply chains are also changing, have become highly complex, and are increasingly difficult to govern and secure. Too often, the code, pipelines, development infrastructure, and third party resources within the software development lifecycle (SDLC) are left insecure, exposing the organization to potential breaches and software supply-chain attacks. 

The damage inflicted by software supply-chain attacks has gained publicity following events such as log4j and Solarwinds. However, these attacks were not isolated, and it’s estimated that software supply chain attacks are increasing at a rate of two to six times per year. As a result, the importance of bringing security and governance to the entirety of the software supply chain is becoming top of mind for businesses globally. 

Introducing Legit Security: Security for software supply chain environments

Legit Security, an Israeli-based security company founded in August 2020, aims to address this acute pain point by providing a security platform that protects the pipelines, infrastructure, code, and people within software supply chains so that businesses can stay safe while releasing software quickly. The platform provides security and developer teams with a “single pane of glass” to secure the SDLC by scanning development pipelines for gaps and leaks, the SDLC infrastructure and systems within those pipelines, and the people and their security hygiene as they operate within it.

Legit Security’s platform aims to remove blind spots and automate governance and compliance for the software supply chain. The platform uses an automated discovery and analysis engine to identify vulnerabilities, measure and track the security posture of teams and development pipelines, and ensure compliance to regulatory and governance frameworks in real-time. By using Legit Security, security and development teams can manage risk more effectively and increase efficiency by focusing on what’s most important.

“Legit provides a single pane of glass to mitigate software development risk. We’re now able to inventory all our SDLC systems and security tools, view developer activity, and detect and remediate vulnerabilities across them fast. Legit’s security scoring also allows me to measure the security posture of different teams and show progress improving it.” – Bob Durfee, Head of DevSecOps at Takeda Pharmaceutical Company

Deep cyber security expertise 

TCV is investing in Legit Security through its recently-announced Velocity Fund, which aims to invest in expansion-stage companies in its sectors of interest.

The founders and executive team of Legit Security have deep experience in cybersecurity. The founders all came from Checkmarx, a leading application security testing business, and had initially met in the Israeli military’s intelligence unit. As cybersecurity researchers and team leads for the renowned Israeli Defense Force’s Unit 8200, they gained real-world security experience with the offensive and defensive tactics specific to software delivery pipelines.

CEO & Co-Founder Roni Fuchs was formerly Senior Director and Head of Software Composition Analysis at Checkmarx, after his previous startup Lumobit was acquired by Checkmarx less than a year after its launch in 2018. Previously, Roni was a senior software engineer at Microsoft. Liav Caspi, CTO & Co-Founder of Legit Security, and Lior Barak, the company’s VP of R&D and Co-Founder, share similar backgrounds: all three overlapped at the Israeli military, Lumbobit, and Checkmarx. Chris Hoff, VP for Worldwide Sales was most recently Regional VP of Sales at Duo Security, having previously held sales roles at EMC, Kaspersky, Cognos, Watchfire/IBM, and CA Technologies. Derick Townsend, VP of Marketing, was most recently VP of Product Marketing at Ping Identity, with prior marketing leadership roles at UnboundID, DXC, ServiceMesh, CA Technologies, iTKO, and IBM.  

Shifting left: The vast “DevSecOps” opportunity

So why are we so excited? Well, on top of the deeply relevant and honed skills that run through the company from its highest level, we believe that Legit Security is on to something big and important in the application security space. Over the past five years, as application development practices have evolved, the notion of “DevSecOps” (development, security, and operations) or “shifting left” has become increasingly popular. 

“Shifting left” aims to make security more agile, repeatable, and automated, ultimately empowering DevOps teams to bring products to market faster. Existing application security solutions generally operate in isolation, resulting in silos throughout the pipeline. Further, blindspots can exist along development pipelines and SDLC systems and infrastructure, including GitHub / GitLab repos, which are not covered by traditional application security tools. In addition, the disparate nature of traditional AppSec tooling requires security teams to navigate across the numerous point solutions to try and stitch together insights into potential vulnerabilities, often leading to “alert fatigue.” 

Legit Security bridges this gap by spanning the SDLC with automated discovery and analysis capabilities that include auto-detection of code repositories, build servers, artifact repositories, and deployed security products such as Snyk and Veracode along with their security coverage. When your SDLC changes, it’s automatically detected by Legit. The platform provides hundreds of best practice software supply chain security policies that can be enforced directly in the product, as well as a unique Legit Security Score to manage risk, track security posture, and monitor compliance to regulatory and governance frameworks in real-time.

This holistic, end-to-end insight enhances governance at various checkpoints, empowering enterprises to derive greater value from existing security tools. It’s no coincidence that customers frequently describe the Legit Security Platform as their “application security command center.”

Where are we now?

Legit Security has now emerged from its pre-launch phase, during which the company has been busy acquiring customers (from Fortune 500 companies to fast moving software-driven businesses), building a platform for demanding enterprise environments, and securing funding from top-tier investors, including TCV. The business has already grown significantly with new offices in the U.S. and Israel, and an expanded team, as well as connections with important partners and advisors.

I’ve known co-founders Liav and Lior for many years, since our time working for the Israeli Defense Forces. We gained invaluable experience there, but perhaps most important was learning that ‘anything is possible’ in cybersecurity with the right talent, focus, and resources.”

Roni Fuchs, CEO & Co-Founder, Legit Security

After military service, the founding team members worked in leading cyber security companies across Israel and recognized a growing gap between traditional AppSec tools and a new generation of rapidly evolving, modern software development environments. The gap was growing and traditional security tools and vendors were unable to catch up.

“Because of the adoption of agile development, cloud, and modern development pipelines, the approach needed to secure software releases has fundamentally changed. It’s no longer just about ‘the code’. Software is now assembled in multiple steps across a supply chain leveraging many trusted contributors, pulling artifacts from countless repositories, built, and assembled on underlying infrastructure that must be securely configured, and all the while providing speed, agility, and efficiency. These modern supply chain environments created a sprawling new attack surface – one that is increasingly exploited by over 2x-6x a year, depending upon the analyst, government agency, or vendor report you read.” – Roni Fuchs, CEO & Co-Founder, Legit Security

TCV team members Matt Brennan (TCV General Partner), Tim McAdam (TCV General Partner), Mark Smith (TCV Venture Partner), and Alex Gorgoni (Investor) are excited to partner with Legit Security, helping to guide the company through its next critical phase of growth. Our team has witnessed first-hand the enthusiastic response of customers as they learn about the unique positioning and scope of the Legit Security platform, and its ease of deployment.

This is a sector we expect to be active in over the coming months, too, and we look forward to being a part of it. 

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The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of TCMI, Inc. or its affiliates (“TCV”). TCV has not verified the accuracy of any of the data or statements by the author and disclaims any responsibility therefor. This blog post is not an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to purchase an interest in any private fund managed or sponsored by TCV or any of the securities of any company discussed. The TCV portfolio companies identified above are not necessarily representative of all TCV investments, and no assumption should be made that the investments identified were or will be profitable. For a complete list of TCV investments, please visit www.tcv.com/all-companies/. For additional important disclaimers regarding this interview and blog post, please see “Informational Purposes Only” in the Terms of Use for TCV’s website, available at http://www.tcv.com/terms-of-use/.

Consolidated in the Cloud: Darwinbox Delivers End-to-End Talent Management on Demand

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Although it’s been over 20 years since McKinsey officially christened the catchphrase “war for talent,” its implications are felt more today than ever before. Global business has become increasingly competitive and borderless, and both the importance and difficulty of attracting and retaining world-class talent has steadily grown. The Covid-induced Great Resignation has now provided the exclamation point needed for companies to wake up to this new reality. 

This massive structural shift has, in turn, escalated the importance of HR teams and shone a spotlight on the tools at their disposal to provide amazing employee experiences from hire-to-retire.

Darwinbox, headquartered in India, has been making waves in this space for many years and we are delighted to welcome them to the TCV family. The company aims to transform HR management and employee engagement via its unique end-to-end cloud-native HR suite. 

Darwinbox’s HCM platform offers both Core HR (the central system of record for employee data) as well as a broad, integrated HR suite spanning the entire employee lifecycle including recruitment, workforce management, employee engagement, performance & talent development, and integrated payroll.

Increasing employee engagement, optimizing performance and productivity, and leveraging technology and data are areas that TCV has been actively investing in. For example, TCV portfolio company Humu’s intelligent technology platform coaches managers and employees into developing work habits that are scientifically proven to drive performance. 

“Investing in technology to find, retain, and engage talent has become inevitable for organizational success,” says Jessica Neal, Venture Partner at TCV. “The pandemic has shown us clearly that we need to support and empower our employees differently, and Darwinbox is on a mission to enable that. I’ve been impressed with their offerings which provide HR leaders with a solution to address the entire employee lifecycle.” 

Challenging the Old Guard

Let’s put Darwinbox’s achievements in context. The mid-market and enterprise HCM landscape in Asia has been dominated by antiquated solutions such as SAP SuccessFactors, Oracle, and, to a lesser extent, Workday for many years. In our view, these platforms were designed decades ago and, owing to their on-prem legacies, have largely failed to innovate. We think they provide rather poor experience for employees and HR teams alike, lack flexibility, have painful & lengthy implementation processes, and are often expensive. 

In contrast, Darwinbox offers a cloud-native, mobile-first offering, architected to be easy to configure and implement even for large and complex organizations. Darwinbox also has deep understanding of the local cultural context ‒ their mobile-optimized offering (optimized to work across a broader range of device and network types) is a prime example of this given the low level of desktop access for employees across industries in some of the emerging markets.

This differentiated approach has enabled Darwinbox to quickly win share in some emerging markets, with 150+ customers already having switched to Darwinbox from SAP, Oracle, or Workday. As a result, it is among the fastest-growing cloud HCM platforms in Asia today, and on track to be the #1 cloud player by scale in Asia within the next two years. 

Darwinbox’s success is receiving global recognition and the company recently secured a prized spot on Gartner’s Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud HCM Suites (the only vendor of Asian origin to do so). It is also the highest-rated HCM platform globally on Gartner Peer Insights (4.8/5 stars).

Putting the Employee First

A key driver of Darwinbox’s success is its design philosophy that puts the employee experience at the heart of every decision the firm makes. The platform replicates the frictionless and highly-optimized user experiences in the workplace that we have become accustomed to in our daily lives, while at the same time preserving enterprise goals on talent management and needs on scalability and security. 

Reflecting this, one of Darwinbox’s north star metrics is user engagement, citing DAU/MAU of 50+% reflecting the value it is providing to its customers (and driving stickiness once the platform has been rolled out across the employee base).

Built from Asia, for the World

Darwinbox, which employs over 500 people today, was co-founded in 2015 by Jayant Paleti, Rohit Chennamaneni, and Chaitanya Peddi who bring deep expertise and collective decades of experience working with HR and digitalization processes from their time working at McKinsey and Ernst & Young. 

While built out of India, the team has taken a very deliberate approach to scaling (e.g. building fully flexible architecture that can be quickly tailored to match local HR workflows) and has always had global ambitions. After several years of operating in India, Darwinbox made its first foray into international expansion in 2019, and began building up its presence in Southeast Asia, a region which exhibited many of the same pain points experienced by customers in India. Since then, Darwinbox has begun expanding into the Middle East and intends to continue expanding its footprint globally, growing an already impressive customer base (1.5M+ users across 650+ companies in over 90 countries).

We, at TCV, are thrilled to be partnering with the entire Darwinbox team on this journey. And, as usual, we’re in it for the long haul.

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The views and opinions expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect those of TCMI, Inc. or its affiliates (“TCV”). TCV has not verified the accuracy of any statements by the speakers and disclaims any responsibility therefor. This blog post is not an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to purchase an interest in any private fund managed or sponsored by TCV or any of the securities of any company discussed. The TCV portfolio companies identified, if any, are not necessarily representative of all TCV investments, and no assumption should be made that the investments identified were or will be profitable. For a complete list of TCV investments, please visit www.tcv.com/all-companies/. For additional important disclaimers regarding this interview and blog post, please see “Informational Purposes Only” in the Terms of Use for TCV’s website, available at http://www.tcv.com/terms-of-use/.

Top Ten Takeaways from TCV’s Q1 Sales Ops Roundtable

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To support our family of portfolio companies navigate these turbulent times, we have been hosting a series of webinars and roundtables, focused on sharing business fundamentals and best practices for c-level executives. We recently brought together members of the TCV family for the quarterly TCV Sales Ops Roundtable featuring Ronnie Gurion, COO of Clio, Matt Cox, VP of Rev Ops at FinancialForce, and Fred Sanders, VP of Rev Ops at OneSource Virtual. 

We gained some great insights. Here are our top 10 takeaways:

  1. Early in the Go-To-Market planning process, push for the key strategic pillars. This will allow the rest of the teams to march in unison. Unless there are fundamental shifts in the business, 70 to 80% of strategic pillars should carry over year over year.

  2. Planning is an expansive process, but too often it becomes sales-centric. You often see account expansion get the short straw of resources, and you often miss some of the biggest opportunities for growth through in-app or product opportunities. Often, the latter have a bigger impact than the sales-centric approach, so be aware.

  3. The most effective way to kill a sales team is through a poorly thought through sales comp plan. And to insert nails further in the coffin, deliver that plan late.

  4. We often see companies rolling out new product and simply telling Sales, “Here’s your new quota.” But adding quota or new product targets to sales teams in this way does not create alignment. We find the most competent and most confident resources in the company are the best set of resources to use in introducing new product. It also works as a learning tool when you more broadly introduce the new product, as it sorts out all sorts of operational issues and gives your top resources visibility into the management team in a new way.

  5. Rather than having annual budgets, we optimize on a few metrics like LTV/CAC or percentage of sales team above quota. That gives leaders a pathway to invest more in Sales in an uncapped way.

  6. When you look at your win-rates, model it out by stage. What moved the needle from stage to stage? Do you know? How closely did your propensity to buy models align to win-rates? Do the same for losses as well to make sure reps are not just warehousing deals.

  7. If you are part of a private equity team, make sure to connect with your peers at other companies. We have found it useful to run meet-ups with specific vendors that have a center of gravity in the portfolio where they can share what the best companies are doing. It’s always useful to learn where companies are hitting obstacles as well, of course.

  8. Many companies build propensity to purchase models primarily focused on new logo growth. Don’t forget to model out propensity to spend for your existing accounts as well. That is just as important in your planning and prioritization process, but often given less focus by sales leaders.

  9. If you are trying to become a platform or moving off a single product, the hot question is going to be bundling. Prototype this out well in advance.

  10. When interviewing sales op talent, the best candidates are the ones that did research about you and your addressable market prior to the interview. Make sure you ask candidates about what they know, and where they see potential opportunity to add value based on what they have learned.

TCV runs quarterly roundtables across executive roles to surface best practices, drive networking and road test ideas. We are looking forward to the Q2 TCV Sales Ops Roundtable, where we’ll focus on sales management team best practice, cadences, as well as share the insights of our ever-growing network of battle-tested leaders.

Making Work Better: Humu Applies Behavioral Science and AI to Optimize Employee and Enterprise Performance

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As the world shifts towards a knowledge economy, enterprises need to re-imagine how they do business. They are realizing that their employees are their most important asset and are searching for a smarter way to engage, encourage, and drive the best performance. Enter Humu, a platform working at the intersection of behavioral science and AI to solve that very issue.

Humu, a recent addition to the TCV portfolio, is rapidly gaining adoption from some of the world’s largest and most complex organizations. Its intelligent technology platform coaches managers and employees into developing work habits that are scientifically proven to drive performance. Humu was co-founded by CEO Laszlo Bock, former Google SVP of People Operations, and is the output of decades of his work and experience in helping make HR a more data-driven function. Laszlo is uniquely positioned to build the Humu technology platform into a must-have for organizations looking to drive employee engagement, optimize performance, and improve productivity.

Specifically, by nudging employees with short, behavioral science-backed recommendations, Humu provides personalized guidance that’s unique to each employee, helping workers to build better habits, while also driving towards organizational goals, including employee retention, manager effectiveness, productivity, and inclusive cultures.

TCV is thrilled to lead Humu’s $60 million Series C. The investment, which follows two years of significant growth for the Company, will fuel new product innovations geared to support managers and their teams. TCV venture partner Jessica Neal, former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix, has joined Humu’s Board of Directors as part of our new partnership.

TCV’s experience in seeing the magic in the Right Content, Right Person, Right Time

TCV has long understood the value of delivering engaging, timely content to the right person at the right time and has invested based on this thesis for over two decades, including in companies like Netflix (video), Spotify (music), Peloton (fitness), and Newsela (K-12 instructional content).

TCV believes that timely content curation and delivery should extend from our consumer lives to our work lives: if Netflix can feed us more of what we need to keep us entertained, why wouldn’t we benefit from similar capabilities in the workplace? Businesses need a system that serves us the right content at the right time to help us perform better.

What is exciting about Humu? Humu is driving real outcomes

Humu’s AI-based Nudge Engine™ technology drives timely “nudges” to encourage employees to do more of what creates optimal outcomes and experiences for employees and enterprises. Nudges are delivered in curated pathways that are algorithmically generated, sequenced, and tailored to a particular initiative and employee.

At a glance:

  • Every Humu nudge is based on academic research and carefully crafted by Humu “people analytics” experts
  • User experience panels ensure nudges are easy to understand and act on. Feedback loops make it possible to turn off what’s not working, and send more of what is
  • Employees turn to nudges more and more over time. Sustained nudge engagement rates across customers are as high as 95%

At Silicon Valley Bank, Humu’s nudges focus managers and employees on what matters most – and remind them at just the right moments to adjust their habits. That could be in supporting managers who may be too focused on execution at the cost of supporting employee development and encouraging them to find ways to offer their people personalized growth opportunities. Don’t take our word for it…hear it directly from Humu’s customer SVB:

“People don’t have to wait for management to roll out a time-intensive program. Humu provides our employees with relevant, customized feedback that’s not generic or mundane. Nudges democratize the employee engagement process; they make learning much timelier and easier for everyone involved. We have a 70% open rate, which means it’s going really well. The right nudge at the right time really makes all the difference.”

Chris Edmonds-Waters, Chief Human Resources Officer at Silicon Valley Bank

A team that helped build a trillion-dollar business, and is now on a mission to solve work for everyone

Humu’s CEO Laszlo Bock helped build and lead Google’s people function for ten years, a role in which he was responsible for attracting, developing, retaining, and delighting ‘Googlers’ (he distilled a lot of his practices and insights into his book published in 2015, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead).

He co-founded Humu in 2017 with former Google colleagues Wayne Crosby (former Director of Engineering) and Dr. Jessie Wisdom (former People Analytics Manager). Together, this formidable team founded Humu “to make work better through machine learning, science, and a little bit of love” – not to mention everything they had learned about smart use of data.

“When we began this journey in 2017, we knew our experience in pioneering the field of people analytics would help us build what we believe is the best technology for supporting managers and employees, and we’re proud of the impact we’ve made.

This latest investment, led by TCV, signals our partners’ confidence in our ability to deliver on that promise long into the future, and we’re excited for what we’ll bring to the market, especially for managers, in the months to come.”

Laszlo Bock, CEO of Humu

TCV is excited to be a partner in building a category leader

TCV believes Humu represents an opportunity to back an emerging leader in the HR technology sector, led by a world-class team that’s uniquely positioned to penetrate a massive market with compelling industry growth tailwinds. With this latest round of funding, Humu aims to take steps towards executing its bold vision of facilitating building a unique, high-performing culture for its client organizations based on proven best practices. As a firm that focuses on long-term value creation, TCV believes that Humu, with its deep background in people analytics, has the potential to make a positive impact on the way we all work.

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The views and opinions expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect those of TCMI, Inc. or its affiliates (“TCV”). TCV has not verified the accuracy of any statements by the speakers and disclaims any responsibility therefor. This post is not an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to purchase an interest in any private fund managed or sponsored by TCV or any of the securities of any company discussed. The TCV portfolio companies identified, if any, are not necessarily representative of all TCV investments, and no assumption should be made that the investments identified were or will be profitable. For a complete list of TCV investments, please visit www.tcv.com/all-companies/. For additional important disclaimers regarding this interview and blog post, please see “Informational Purposes Only” in the Terms of Use for TCV’s website, available at http://www.tcv.com/terms-of-use/.