As someone who was already interested in investing from a personal standpoint, Anu Sharma said it was always on her mind to turn her “side project” into a full time thing. She did that recently when she joined the investment team at Madrona Venture Group.
Sharma, our latest Geek of the Week, spent eight years at Amazon and Amazon Web Services, most recently leading a product management team at AWS for a new service, AWS Outposts, which extends AWS infrastructure and services outside of AWS owned data centers to customer locations or colocation spaces.
Prior to the tech giant, Sharma co-founded an apparel e-commerce company called LifeLemon, led marketing at Flipkart, was a developer at Oracle and was an associate at Softbank Venture Capital in India.
“I’m an engineer and have always liked to get to the first principles on why we create new products before diving into the what and how,” Sharma said. “At Amazon, I was lucky to have been part of the phenomenal growth in AWS and observed the degree of clarity people had about why, what, and how as well as how they got there.”
Sharma felt that there was an opportunity to apply that same rigor in evaluating new business opportunities and in growing young companies. She wanted wanted to build on her strengths of connecting several different pieces together in addition to diving deep where required.
Stratify CEO Brian Camposano. (Madrona Venture Labs Photo)
Stratify came out of stealth mode and announced a $4.9 million seed investment round led by Madrona Venture Group.
The company, which started in Seattle but is now fully remote, spun out of Madrona Venture Labs (MVL), the Seattle startup studio backed by Madrona. GeekWire previously reported on the company this past May.
Stratify is led by Brian Camposano, the former CFO at Docker who was an entrepreneur-in-residence at MVL since March. He previously spent 12 years at Deutsche Bank and nearly four years at Concur, the travel expense giant that sold to SAP for $8.3 billion in 2014.
The startup aims to automate the budgeting and forecasting process, replacing legacy software used by various types of companies. It allows for collaboration across various departments and enables a real-time “continuous planning model.” Machine learning is used to identify performance gaps and create revised forecast scenarios.
The idea is to help finance professionals save time on manual and administrative tasks, freeing them up to dig into the numbers and identify key trends.
“Continuous budgeting is an important evolution of the traditional budgeting workflow, as it leverages access to real-time data in order to analyze financial and operational performance in real-time, compare those results to the underlying budget assumptions, address any identified operational issues to optimize performance, and re-forecast the business when business dynamics have changed,” explained Camposano.
Stratify natively integrates with a customers’ core systems of record and can automatically create reports and calculate KPIs based on the financial and operational performance of the business, Camposano said.
Docker CEO Steve Singh at the 2017 GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit. (GeekWire Photo)
Steve Singh is chairman at Stratify. He and Camposano have crossed paths multiple times. Singh helped start Concur back in 1993 and led the company until 2017, before joining Docker as CEO in May 2017. Camposano arrived at the software startup a few months later.
Singh joined Madrona Venture Group, which created MVL, as managing director this past January.
“Intelligent applications are the future of enterprise software and no area is more ripe for this work than the office of the CFO,” Singh said in a statement. “The process of creating, measuring and updating a budget should be continuous, not the current system of heads down work that is often based on complex and breakable spreadsheets.”
Stratify has five employees, including Brian Torrey, a former Adaptive Insights exec, and Venky Krishnan, who was previously at Apptio and Microsoft. The company plans to triple the size of its team over the next year.
Camposano said the pandemic and economic crisis have not negatively affected Stratify. He said the current situation has “highlighted the importance of a tool like Stratify.”
“In particular, the ability to quickly and automatically create new forecast scenarios that reflect changing business dynamics, and our collaboration capabilities that allow distributed management teams to access consistent data sets quickly and easily to ensure all stakeholders are operating with the same understanding of the state of the business,” he said.
Coatue, which announced a $700 million early-stage fund last year, also participated in Stratify’s seed round.
Madrona has made an effort to invest in fintech companies and expand Seattle as a fintech hub.
Other recent MVL spinouts include Zeitworks, led by Seattle startup veterans Ryan Windham and Ben Elowitz, and Simplata, a data security startup led former BMW ReachNow CEO Steve Banfield and former Domain Tools CTO Bruce Roberts.
MVL raised its third fund last year with plans to launch up to a dozen new startups.
Bay Area-based startup Coda raised a $80 million round led by Kleiner Perkins for its online document collaboration software.
Founded in 2014 and led by Shishir Mehrotra, a former director at Microsoft and Google, Coda brings together documents, spreadsheets, and apps into one platform. It uses “building blocks,” templates, and customizable views, and also connects to other apps such as Jira and Slack. Customers include Spotify, Uber, Intercom, Square, and others.
Seattle venture capital firm Madrona Venture Group also participated in the Series C round, investing out of its Acceleration Fund.
“Coda envisions a future where documents are alive and interactive – enabling users to interact with data, to interact with systems, and to automate previously manual processes,” Madrona Managing Director S. “Soma” Somasegar wrote in a blog post. “Coda imagines a world where everybody can be a ‘maker’ and can use Coda to express what they want to and collaborate with others seamlessly.”
Somasegar said the investment in Coda fits into Madrona’s focus on backing companies in the “Future of Work” and “low-code/no-code” areas.
Welcome to the world of documents as powerful as applications – @MadronaVentures thrilled to be a part of the @coda_hq @shishirmehrotra journey #futureofwork https://t.co/7Ssh5FSMQg
— S. Somasegar (@SSomasegar) August 11, 2020
Coda is riding a trend of increased use of workplace collaboration software, particularly in the past several months with remote work amid the pandemic.
Other investors in round include Underscore VC, Renegade Partners, NGP Capital, and Hawk Equity. Greylock, General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures, and a number of well-known angels previously invested.
“With all these backers joining the maker generation, we’re more equipped than ever to reimagine docs,” Mehrotra wrote in a blog post. “In the past year, we’ve made big progress in making Coda simpler, cleaner, and faster for your team; now you can expect even more.”
Mehrotra co-founded Coda with Alex DeNeui, who sold his previous startup DocVerse to Google. They previously raised a $60 million round for Coda in 2017.
Coda is now valued at $636 million, according to Forbes. The 70-person company plans to double headcount and is growing an engineering team in the Seattle region.
“It’s clear that there is true value in Coda’s vision for the world, that if given the right set of building blocks, anyone can make a doc as powerful as an app,” Mamoon Hamid, partner at Kleiner Perkins and an early investor in Slack, Box, Yammer, and other companies, said in a statement. “Today, Coda is more relevant than ever as teams adapt processes and sharpen their workflows.”
Anu Sharma. (Photo courtesy of Anu Sharma)
Stratify CEO Brian Camposano. (Madrona Venture Labs Photo)
Docker CEO Steve Singh at the 2017 GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit. (GeekWire Photo)