We’re thrilled to announce our partnership with Jeff Schwartz and our investment in DataroomHQ, the AI-powered platform that empowers Finance, RevOps, and GTM Analytics teams to get to ground truth on all critical operational metrics and drive efficient growth.
The SaaS Metrics and Planning Challenge
As an early-stage founder, reporting out on the state of the business takes too long, is too manual, and results in different answers depending on who you ask. And as a CEO of a growth company, one of your most critical jobs is capital allocation - where to spend a marginal dollar.
Anyone who has spent any time on the business side of a SaaS business – whether as IC, leader, or Founder – and at any stage – whether early-stage, growth-stage, or even public – has almost certainly run into the Metrics Challenge. Prepping for a Monday sales pipeline call, gathering data for a quarterly business review offsite, or trying to align on Board slides all bring with them the fundamental question, “Which team’s metrics are the ‘right’ ones?”
And it’s not just reporting. There are similar challenges when deciding what actions to take to “move the needle” on the business, whether it’s on where to spend the remaining budget in-quarter, how to identify which customers are a drag on your business (low-margin, high-churn, etc), or what teams should get additional headcount. Reporting, planning and execution all require one thing - understanding ground truth. This is especially true in a more capital-constrained environment that all SaaS businesses now operate in, to find the right mix of growth and profitability.
The problems are real and consequential. We believe Jeff and the Dataroom team will solve these problems with a product customers love.
The Operating System for the Business
Dataroom is building the unified platform for SaaS finance and operations teams, empowering teams to both understand “ground truth” and critically also make better forward-looking decisions powered by a predictive analytics engine. The vision is ambitious: the “OS for the Business.” Financial planning software is backward-looking rather than forward-looking. Excel is powerful but building pivot tables aren’t anybody’s idea of a fun day and doesn’t incorporate the power of ML, and nothing in the market easily maps business analytics results into Board presentations.
Dataroom solves these problems and more, making it dead simple for founders, finance, and GTM Ops teams to assess and drive the business forward with a single, unified perspective and with strategies for optimization.
We love partnering with founders who have had a front-row seat to hypergrowth and who have deep customer empathy. These are the things that see founders through tough times on the journey to building something valuable, and Jeff embodies both of these characteristics. He is passionate about data science and was an early employee at DataRobot, where he built the precursor to Dataroom for internal use as that business grew very quickly. And he has a deeply rooted empathy for the persona that Dataroom addresses - an often overworked yet critically important person or team whose insights drive so many decisions across the business.
We’ve been working with Jeff and the team since last year, and are excited to announce our participation in Dataroom’s $3.5M first round of financing and join friends at Oceans Ventures, Bling Capital, and Cortical Ventures in supporting the company!
If you’re intrigued by what you’ve heard so far and want to get a demo, check it out here (or ask us to connect you directly)!
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Garuda Ventures is a B2B-focused, pre-seed and seed-stage venture firm. Subscribe below to get the latest from us, and visit garuda.vc to learn more.