Investment - June 2020
The Janvest General Partnership is pleased to announce the execution of Limited Partnership IV’s second investment in an Israeli founded emerging technology company. Below you will find information about the business and corresponding investment. We welcome your questions and feedback.
DEAL SUMMARY
Company Name / Rupert
Website / www.HiRupert.com
Offices / New York and Tel Aviv
Sectors / Data Analytics and Business Intelligence
Founders / 2
Year Founded / 2019
Total Janvest LP IV Investment / $850,000 across two rounds
- Pre-Seed Round (April 2020) / $350,000
- Seed Round (May 2020) / $500,000
Total Size of Investment Rounds / $2,850,000
Notable Co-Investors / IA Ventures (New York)
Percentage Held by Janvest LP IV / 8.5%
DEAL NOTES: In April 2020, Janvest led a small pre-seed round in Rupert with a $350,000 investment with the plan to invest up to $1.5MM in the seed round. Less than three weeks later, Rupert received a term sheet for a $2.5MM seed round to be led by NY-based IA Ventures, one of the premier early stage investors in the U.S., backing such companies as DataDog (NASDAQ: DDOG), TransferWise, DataRobot, DigitalOcean, Octane Lending, and Flatiron Health, which have collectively raised billions in follow-on venture financing. While IA Ventures wanted to take the entire round by itself, given the prior investment by LP IV, Janvest was allowed to take its super pro rata and invest an additional $500,000 into the business keeping Janvest and IA as the only external investors in Rupert (numerous other funds were shut out of the deal). In addition, both Janvest and IA will have identical pro rata rights at Rupert’s next round of financing for which LP IV will have plenty in reserve to buy-up if possible.
TECHNOLOGY DESCRIPTION
Rupert is a data operation optimization platform designed to support enterprise analyst teams that are managing, organizing, and responding to a daily influx of data demands from business users. On average only about 3% of an enterprise’s workforce has training on complex, yet critical Business Intelligence (BI) tools that provide data-driven insights to support an array of commercial initiatives, projects, and tasks. As a result, when non-technical employees require a specific data set, they must submit a ‘ticket’ to the analyst who then leverages these specialized BI solutions to gather relevant data, compile the corresponding report, and return it to the requesting user. Given the limited size of analyst teams relative to the number of inbound requests for data, 57% of users wait over a week for a response. Rupert is utilizing advanced and proprietary Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to relieve some of this bottleneck and in turn make analysts and business users significantly more productive and efficient.
For Analysts
Rupert provides analysts with the first ‘smart ticketing’ system that receives and autonomously analyzes and manages inbound data requests. By understanding what is being asked, both literally and contextually, Rupert can automatically compile reports from pre-existing data in the organization and return it near instantly to the business user thus eliminating time consuming redundancies and leaving the analysts to focus only on the most complex and/or high value data projects. In addition to providing this much needed workflow management and demand analysis functionality, Rupert also helps analysts get better use out of their legacy Business Intelligence solutions, thus dramatically increasing the ROI of pre-purchased data products.
For Business Users
Rupert lives within the email of business users eliminating the need to work with complicated dashboards or interfaces. When a user has a request, they simply email the question to their enterprise-designated Rupert address (e.g. Rupert@Cisco.com), at which point the platform goes to work within the analyst workflow and comes back with near immediacy with not only the requested data, but also data that Rupert believes might be relevant. In addition to improving the efficiency of this process, it also encourages business users to better engage with and leverage their organization’s data, thus allowing even the smallest business decisions to become data driven.
MARKET APPLICATIONS
Rupert has the unique ability to orchestrate business functions, data teams, and data assets. Rather than compete against some of the market’s biggest companies in the enterprise Business Intelligence space, Rupert is complementary to them all and has applications amongst their growing customer bases. This strategy by Rupert’s management team puts the company in the center of three massive BI segments:
While Rupert has applications amongst any size enterprise with an analyst team, the company has chosen to focus initially on high growth SaaS and eCommerce businesses in the United States. These are highly data driven verticals with the greatest number of replicable use cases and the simplest integration. According to Rupert’s Business Analyst Study, SaaS and eCommerce companies make up 9% of their total addressable market. This path was chosen after extensive market diligence and talking with leading companies in a variety of verticals including, but not exclusive to Anheuser-Busch InBev, Wyndham Hotels, BuzzFeed, Check Point Technologies, Fiverr, Monday.com, Wix and Google.
MARKET ADOPTION
Rupert is an early stage company working on an initial version of their product in collaboration with their design partner, Wix (NYSE: WIX), which has approximately 100 business analysts servicing 3,000 employees. At present Rupert is serving as a buffer between a team of analysts and business functions on a mission critical use-case. Through this relationship, Rupert hopes to expand to more users and use cases and also prepare their product for an aggressive push into the market in Q3-Q4 2020. With a solution of this sort, high accuracy in terms of ingesting, analyzing, and producing data is a must and a significant barrier to entry for other potential competitors.
TEAM:
VALUE-ADD
As both of Rupert’s founders live in New York City, Janvest has been able to work closely and in-person with them for several months leading up to the investment. There were three areas where Janvest focused primarily when it came to advisory and introductions:
1. COVID-19 Adapation – How to maximize the use of its funds to make the necessary business gains while taking into consideration longer than expected sales cycles and depressed corporate budgets
2. Co-Investment Partners – While Janvest led Rupert’s pre-seed round and had the capacity to lead the company’s seed round as well, it is the belief of the GP that having additional ‘smart capital’ around the table is advantageous for the company and a heavy de-risking agent for the fund itself. Therefore, Janvest made several concessions in order to welcome such a reputable investor as IA Ventures to the Rupert cap table.
3. Prospective Board Member Introductions – Rupert is working on a complex technology for a highly technical audience within mid-size to large enterprises. Having an industry expert on the Board is not mandatory, but something that seemed worth exploring. As such, Janvest made a number of introductions to prospective Board members including the former Chief Strategy Officer at SAP (NYSE: SAP) who oversaw the company’s efforts to build their own Business Intelligence platform.
JANVEST CONTACT INFORMATION
Brian Rosenzweig
Atlanta, GA
Brian@Janvest.com
Dafna Winocur Biran
Tel Aviv, Israel
Dafna@Janvest.com
Daniel Frankenstein
New York City, NY
Daniel@Janvest.com
