Entrepreneurs Niji Sabharwal and Jenn Knight have few complaints about building a startup and … [+]
AgentSync
It was much easier for entrepreneurs Niji Sabharwal and Jenn Knight to raise money recently than they were in their seed round in June 2020. Then, the founders of AgentSync had just appeared in Denver – a city where they hadn’t spent a long weekend before – with minivan -up loads and a new empty house. Knight, the starting CTO, was heavy. “I knocked on neighbors’ doors to get a WiFi password,” said Sabharwal, its CEO.
The two founders of the husband and wife had a much easier time with AgentSync’s new Series A funding round, a $ 25 million round that valued the industry at $ 220 million – up 10x from the direct valuation. eight months ago. This time, the startup, which monitors insurance broker licensing data for organizations and carriers, picked up without the need to update pitch deck.
As first reported in the Forbes Midas Touch newsletter on Sunday, AgentSync ‘s new round came together quickly, the result of a combination of founding credit, rapid growth, and a popular product. Once at the heart of Zenefits ’high-profile management problems in 2015 – allowing for cutting corners that could have benefited from AgentSync – Sabharwal turned to Zenefits founder and vice president, Parker Conrad, for his first review when he started out. It was through Conrad that he met many of the startup’s seed investors, led by Elad Gil and Raymond Tonsing at Caffeinated Capital in August 2020.
AgentSync still had 80% of that $ 4.4 million seed when, in a strategy session with Gil, the solo investor encouraged Sabharwal to take in more money and move faster. This time, another Denver started linking them to Operator Collective; another old Zenefits connection, meanwhile, moved in to co-ordinate the tour. David Sacks, a veteran of PayPal and Yammer, had invested in Zenefits while it was led by Conrad; after the company scandal, he was interim CEO turned. Conrad and Sacks are not friends. But both saw the potential for AgentSync tools to prevent such situations in the future. VC Sacks, Craft Ventures, dominated Series A, with Conrad blessing Sabharwal. Through Sacks, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff also personally cut a check.
Reaching $ 220 million so fast – Knight, who met Sabharwal at LinkedIn, held Stripe ‘s lead role until he promised a full – time start less than a year ago – which was only possible due to a combination of factors , including its growth rate and market size. But Sabharwal points out one other key difference that he says entrepreneurs don’t value enough: transparent communication.
AgentSync sends out monthly updates in the first week of each month like clockwork; these updates provide a detailed breakdown of their messenger and sales data and spend by department, without comment. That’s how the Sabharwal teams worked at LinkedIn and Zenefits, he says; it is surprising that more beginners do not follow a suit. “Excellent, data-driven updates are the biggest difference we’ve made,” he says.
It will help revenues grow 6x in 2020 and 10x the year before; with 14% of regular revenue coming from customers expanding their own distribution channels from using the tools, and 9% from a broker hiring a product still in pilot, AgentSync can noting that its navigation market is growing, too, along with customer churn his CEO says he is still at zero so far. (Even Zenefits ‘reputation has worked to Sabharwal’ s advantage, he says, as curiosity about his experiences there has prompted some customers to take his call.)
But Sabharwal says any entrepreneur can benefit by pledging the data and sharing it freely with intellectuals. “Creating a lot of transparency and visibility means that when it comes time to say, ‘hey, we want to fund these new R & D initiatives,’ we don’t have to believe anyone. They know us, they trust us, they see the updates. It’s a quick conversation. ”
AgentSync founders are “big nerds,” self-explanatory, planning to use the funding to achieve the ultimate goal of linking their previous work experiences to something like LinkedIn for producers insurance, which will be able to find and maintain certificates of compliance wherever they work.
That means hiring AgentSync, something else that the startup says it does differently. Most of the company’s production and engineering teams – which include about 20 of their 50 or so employees – are women, feat Sabharwal says was impossible but by actively recruiting from different pools of candidates and ending trust in warm references. “It’s very difficult, but it’s very important to us as a company that the board has a different perspective,” he explains. “We don’t have a strong group of people, and that makes our decisions a lot better. ”