This June, Oribi completed its first investment round. I’m very excited to update you that I’ve raised $5.4 million from an investor ‘dream team’: Haim Sadger from Sequoia Capital (the world’s leading venture capital fund, with whom I’ve already had the privilege of working with once), Rona Segev from TLV Partners and Zohar Gilon. I’m extremely grateful that this great team believes in me and in our product.
Every day, a few articles are published in the press about some startup’s financing round, with all the ‘usual’ details – how much money was raised, who the investors are, what does the company do, and who’s on the team. In this post, I chose to share the events behind the scenes – the investor deck I used, why the product has changed since the last time I wrote about it, how I chose which investors to contact, why did I choose to work with several investors and how I felt during the financing round.
So, what are we developing?
A few months back, I talked about a Facebook-ads analytics oriented product. This has changed a lot since then, although in retrospect, I only went back to my roots. Advice I often give entrepreneurs who make their first steps, is that the most important thing is simply to start, rather than wait months or years for the perfect idea or the right partner; Just start building a product, and while being ‘hand on’ you’ll learn the market much better, being able to improve (or pivot) it in the right direction. This advice was also helpful for me.
When I founded a new startup, it was clear to me that I wanted to build a B2B company, but with a simple and approachable product that will completely change the way companies work. In the past, I mentioned being inspired by companies such as Zenpayroll, Zendesk, Stripe, and Slack, which started out in highly competitive markets but managed to become market leaders by creating a simple product. The primary reason why they’ve been such a source of inspiration is that they’ve managed to make a solution accessible to the entire market, rather than only enterprise companies. I think that the current world of BI/analytics presents an amazing opportunity – think of the effort required to monitor basic data about product/website usage. There are currently dozens of successful, enterprise-oriented companies, with highly complex solutions requiring integrations and code annotations. Simpler tools, such as MixPanel or Google Analytics require ongoing support from developers to add events and develop scenarios you would like to monitor. I’ve started working on Facebook analytics, rather than general analytics, because it was important for me to build a profitable company as quickly as possible, and I felt that the combination of a real need in this field and a major budget could make the company profitable fast. We launched a beta version in early February, and quickly reached a few hundred companies who used the product, and then several thousands. By working with customers, I came to understand that I’m capable of creating a tool that would change the way people work with data. The customers gave me the confidence to chase my major dream: a real industry game-changer.
So, this is the product we’ve been developing: