Crew Capital's Community Newsletter #22

Welcome to the June edition of the Crew Capital Community newsletter! We have some exciting announcements to share, including our investment in SurrealDB’s Series A, our portfolio company Klarity announcing their Series B led by Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross, and an amazing interview with the CTO of Paylocity.

Mark your calendar for Tuesday, July 23! We’ll be hosting the Crew Capital Enterprise Tech Pitch & Showcase. If you’re a founder or work at a B2B tech startup, come join us! Six selected startups will pitch and demo for 2 minutes, receiving live feedback from a panel consisting of top investors, advisors and technical founders including:

• Dylan Reider, Partner at Crew Capital
• Michael Droesch, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners.
• Doug Hanna, Advisor, Investor & Former COO at Grafana
• Lukasz Niepolski, Co-Founder & Head of Engineering at Rilla
• Kunal Abichandani, Head of Design at Rilla

Want to be in the lineup for your shot to pitch? Add your pitch deck link when you register! Just looking to participate and connect? Join us! Click here for more information and to confirm your spot at the event!

Recent Investments

SurrealDB: We’re thrilled to announce our investment in SurrealDB’s $20M Series A financing alongside our friends at FirstMark, Georgian, and Alumni Ventures! SurrealDB is building the ultimate multi-model database platform that seamlessly integrates relational, graph, and document database capabilities.

Cofounded by brothers Tobie Morgan Hitchcock and Jaime Morgan Hitchcock, SurrealDB is rapidly becoming one of the most successful open-source projects, with over 500K downloads and 26K GitHub stars, and is already trusted by developers at industry leaders such as Nvidia, Salesforce, HSBC, and Samsung.

Content from the Crew Collective

Operator Insights: We recently sat down with Rachit Lohani, the Chief Technology Officer at Paylocity, a global provider of cloud-based HR and payroll software solutions. Rachit has a wealth of knowledge in product and engineering, having spent time in leadership at major organizations such as Atlassian, Intuit, and Netflix.

He and Crew Capital’s General Partner Brandon Deer discussed Rachit’s career trajectory, tackling complex challenges at different levels of scale, growing engineering teams, and leveraging AI to transform human capital management.

A short preview:

No manager wakes up one day and suddenly has the wherewithal to manage a team of thousands. It’s impossible to interact with that many people every week, let alone every day. For Rachit, leading a team of 2,000 people, as he does today, means setting an example. “How you show up in 10, 20, 30 minutes, how you respond to Slacks, messages or emails, it leaves a lasting impression,” he said. “As a leader, I know I’m not developing software anymore. I barely spend time looking at the architecture, the design, and the product road maps. I spend a lot of time being a catalyst for the team.”

👀 Read the entire article article & watch the full video!

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

Recent Events

Check out some pics below from our recent event during NY Tech Week cohosted with Rubik Hub where we brought together over 100 amazing founders, operators, and VCs from across NYC and the European tech ecosystem for networking and a fireside chat on the early-stage venture market. Thanks everyone for coming!

What have our start-ups been up to this month?

• Congratulations to Klarity on announcing their $70M Series B financing led by Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross, with participation from Y Combinator, Tola Capital, Picus Capital, Invus Capital and Scale Venture Partners. Klarity’s platform automates document-related processes for accounting, finance, & ops teams at large companies like Intercom, UiPath, Zoom, Zendesk, Cloudflare, and many others. It's been amazing watching their platform’s development since we initially invested at the Series A and could not be happier for the team on this incredible milestone!
• Quarter20 continues to ship, ship, ship! They just launched enhanced CAD viewer functionality, smart tools tables, and an updated UI. This month's highlight is the new feature for adding non-CAD parts to the BOM. Now, both CAD and non-CAD parts, such as epoxies and harnessing, can be included in the Parts Table on the operations page. For anyone interested in hardware, check out Quarter20 to learn more about how they’re streamlining documentation for hardware teams!
• Otterize released a major expansion of its Cloud Security Suite, featuring a new Blast Radius Analysis & Remediation tool. This feature is designed to detect exposed infrastructure across various Kubernetes clusters and cloud environments, providing actionable insights to protect against these vulnerabilities and violations.
• Subskribe just introduced Zeppa, the new development language for customizing Subskribe CPQ to SaaS businesses' unique quoting needs and requirements. Zeppa doesn’t require coding knowledge, and business users can easily read and use it.

Startup Monthly Spotlight

The AI-powered Infrastructure for Building Customer-Facing Integrations

💡Mission: In 10 years software companies will run on thousands of specialized apps, all working together seamlessly. Today, while B2C apps on our iPhones can exchange data easily with a few taps, our B2B apps require messy integrations that are complex and require months of engineering time.

Integration.app is building an AI-powered integration platform, serving as the connective tissue across all SaaS apps, with an integration network that is widely accessible to everyone to use and build on top of. Powered by LLMs, Integration.app allows engineers to write their own integrations to any application faster than ever before.

👨🏽💼Meet the CEO: Daniil Bratchenko, the founder of Integration.App, brings a wealth of experience in software development and automation. Before Integration.App, he spent over seven years at DataRobot in Boston, starting as one of their first employees and later becoming VP of Business Engineering where he scaled the business operations towards their $6 billion valuation. He previously sold his startup to Yandex and has 20+ years experience in building & scaling software products.

🚀What Sets Them Apart: Unlike iPaaS systems, unified API platforms, or other integration tools, Integration.app acts as a lower-level layer of infrastructure that SaaS companies can build, manage, and troubleshoot hundreds of integrations. The platform is composed of multiple building blocks, APIs & SDKs that empower developers to build any customer-facing integrations with full control and flexibility

Integration.app’s Connector Builder uses LLMs to enable engineers to build integrations faster than ever before. Connector Builder ingests API docs and intelligently maps data to create a connector to any SaaS app that has an API. This removes the barrier of pre-built integrations offered by other providers and opens up the landscape for any SaaS company to build niche/vertical app integrations in just a few hours.

🔎 Discover More: Crew’s investment thesis, read about Connector Builder, or see here how Integration.app is building the AI-powered integration platform of the future.

Need an intro? Reach out to us at sonia@crewcapital.co or dylan@crewcapital.co

Job Openings

We're always on the lookout to connect exceptional candidates with our portfolio companies. To learn more about the opportunities, reach out to our Head of Platform, Sonia Damian at sonia@crewcapital.co. If you want to explore all available job opportunities within our portfolio companies, please visit our career page.

• SurrealDB, the ultimate multi-model database for tomorrow's serverless, jamstack, single-page, and traditional applications, is looking for a Senior Backend Engineer with GO to grow they Cloud team, based in Europe.
• Otterize, building a workload Identity and Access Management platform, is looking for their first Enterprise Account Executive to help expand their GTM efforts, based in Israel.
• Aktos, the operating system that powers the $18B Credit Collections industry, is looking for a Senior Full-Stack Engineer (ideally backend leaning with Python), as well as New Grads Software Engineers passionate about Python. The team is split across LA, NYC, and Canada, and is open to different geographies for this role, though time zones in ET or PT are preferred.
• Stealth company, building the next-gen market research platform for investors, corporate development teams, and strategy teams by using cutting-edge AI-powered voice capture. They are looking for a Lead Backend Software Engineer with NodeJS experience based in NYC.

- Rilla, the leading conversation intelligence software for outside sales is looking for Software Engineers, Account Managers, AI/ML Engineers and Talent Acquisition Partners based in New York.

Quote of the Month

"Thinking in terms of reducing burn and extending runway is healthy because it forces any company to focus their investments on the things that will have the biggest impact. This is different from indiscriminate cuts, which can stifle innovation and sacrifice long-term growth for short-term cash flow." - April Koh, CEO & Co-founder of Spring Health in Building a Mental Health Unicorn: The Entrepreneurial Journey of April Koh

If you're a founder or know any exceptional early-stage B2B SaaS founders looking to raise, feel free to reach out to us here.