Sydney-based email marketing platform Vero has just secured $4 million from Square Peg Capital, but for a startup focused on data, one element wasn’t included in the pitch deck: complicated charts.
“Vero is an example of a pitch deck that we saw with no charts in it … that was highly unusual,” Square Peg partner Tushar Roy tells StartupSmart.
While the company’s co-founder and chief executive Chris Hexton says the business had plenty of detailed information and numbers available for investors to peruse, he instead approached the pitching process by trying to keep things simple and illustrating the startup’s big wins.
“The way I approached it that we just tried to be honest throughout, and at the start [of the pitching process], you’re meeting people who don’t know much about you,” Hexton says.
“Chris did a fantastic job in using simple words that proved why he was winning,” Roy explains.
Vero has been bootstrapped since launching five years ago and the platform, which allows clients to model customer data and lets various teams work together to collaborate on customer messaging, now turns over multiple millions of dollars a year, Hexton says.
There are plans in the works to double revenue over the next couple of years, and Hexton says the team knew the time had come to look for investors when they reached a point where the projects on the table needed extra funds to fully be realised.
The startup will use the funds to fully expand its operations beyond the current 250 customers on its books, with clients currently including the likes of Canva.
Hexton says the business solves a big problem for organisations by providing a means to leverage data to better communicate with their customers.
“The macro need of businesses worldwide is that they are collecting more and more data from their customers,” he says.
In terms of the benefits investors see, Roy says Square Peg took notice of the way Vero had a proven track record and offered a service nobody else on the market does.
“We see a lot of businesses in the space, but what attracted us particularly to Vero is solving a problem that’s manifesting today that will continue to exist into the future. This is allowing marketing teams and data scientists to come together in one data platform to create automated actions in real time,” Roy says.
To Hexton’s mind, the startup is strong because not only is there growth on the table, but the team is clear about its wins so far and can clearly explain where it’s going.
“I like to think we came at it [fundraising] from the right angle, we had a sophisticated understanding of what we’ve done,” he says.
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