Crew Capital's Community Newsletter #16

Crew Capital's Community Newsletter #16

We come to your inbox today with our last newsletter of the year. And what a difference a year makes! We exit 2023 feeling better about the macro environment for enterprise tech than we did a year ago, with an improving demand environment, looser budgetary environment, and optimistic sentiment among founders and investors alike on what’s in store for 2024.

We close out the year with a recap of our investments and a roundup of the content we brought to you in 2023, as well as some fresh insights from our recent roundtable focused on customer success.

Happy holidays to all, and a healthy and prosperous new year!


Content from the Crew Collective

Portfolio Roundtable: We recently hosted a roundtable featuring Dan Farley, a 4x customer success leader who currently serves as VP of Customer Success at Lunio, a digital advertising protection platform. During the discussion, we explored various aspects of establishing an effective Customer Success organization, covering topics such as creating hiring roadmaps, exploring different organizational models, and understanding the optimal timing for building a CS team.

Dan Farley - VP of Customer Success

A short preview:

Farley values net revenue retention as his primary KPI when building customer success teams, and that breaks down into two components: gross revenue retention & revenue growth. At Crew Capital, we consider net revenue retention to be one of the most important metrics that SaaS founders must track. Depending on the end-market that a startup sells into, there are differences in what good versus great looks like. For a startup selling to SMB, NRR in the 100-105% range might be healthy if the number of customers is expanding each year. For startups selling to mid-market or enterprise customers, 110-120% is good, 120-130% is great, and 130%+ is best-in-class. 

🔍 Check out the highlights here!

Want more Crew content? Follow us on TikTok, LinkedIn or YouTube for insights on company building from some of the best founders and operators across the software industry!


2023 Recap

Our New Investments: In 2023, we announced five new investments, spanning a variety of sectors including application software, infrastructure software, and healthcare.

  • Integration.app - we led a $3.5M Seed round in the company, led by CEO/Founder Daniil Bratchenko. Integration.app is building the first AI-powered integrations stack, facilitating easy creation and management of customer-facing integrations. Read more here.
  • Aktos - we co-led a $4.4M Seed round alongside our friends at 8VC. Aktos is led by cofounders Peter Wang and Daniel Pao, and is building the modern operating system for the accounts receivable management industry. Read more here.
  • Angle Health - we invested in the company’s $58M Series A. Angle is led by co-founders Tylon Wang and Anirban Gangopadhyay, who are revolutionizing health insurance with their digital-first, fully-licensed approach to building a modern health insurance platform. Read more here.
  • Otterize - we invested in the company’s $11.5M seed round, led by Index Ventures. Cofounders Tomer Greenwald, Ori Shoshan, and Uri Sarid are building the new standard in service-to-service authorization with an innovative approach leveraging intent-based access control. Otterize reduces friction for developers while improving security. Read more here.
  • Dylibso - we invested in the company’s $6.6M pre-seed & seed financings. Dylibso is led by cofounders Steve Manuel, Zach Shipko, and Benjamin Eckel, and is building software tools to help developers take WebAssembly to production. Read more here.


Updates on Existing Investments: Amidst the market's fluctuating fundraising landscape, 3 of our existing portfolio companies have successfully announced new follow-on funding rounds and 1 exited just this week.

  • Spiff just announced their acquisition by Salesforce. We’re incredibly excited for CEO/Founder Jeron Paul and the entire Spiff team!
  • MaintainX announced their $50M Series C, led by Bain Capital Ventures. We’re thrilled for CEO Chris Turlica and his team as they continue to build the number one modern CMMS software platform.
  • Vartana announced their $20m Series B, led by Activant Capital, as cofounders Kush Kella and Ahmed Sharif scale the leading modern B2B financing platform.
  • Cerby announced their $17M Series A, led by Two Sigma Ventures. Cofounders Belsasar Lepe and Vidal Gonzalez continue to execute on their vision to secure any application across the modern enterprise!


Content from the Crew Collective: This year, we've added 32 new articles to our blog, a collection of insightful conversations we've had with the exceptional founders and operators in our community, focused on the intricacies of startup creation. Check out this year’s highlights below and thank you to everyone in the Crew family for your continued support!



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