A lot of doors start to open for business leaders and their organizations after they secure funds from investors. Raising money can unlock continued growth, facilitating innovation and breaking new ground on a promising idea or product.
For some CEOs, those funds might be invested in the company’s technology. Relatedly, those investments might inform staffing decisions, like increasing tech-facing roles like data and engineering, or bolstering external-facing teams like sales, marketing and customer success.
What do some of these efforts look like? Three CEOs whose companies have raised funds within this past year shared with Built In the stories behind the tech investments they made — and their advice to other CEOs who find themselves in similar positions.
Gina Bartasi, Founder & CEO of Kindbody
Company snapshot: This New York City-based healthtech company offers fertility assessments, treatments and services such as egg freezing. Launched in 2018, Kindbody emphasizes the accessibility of care. “We think that everyone — Black, white, brown, gay, straight, trans — should have access to fertility care. The only fundamental way to do that is to bring cost down so that it’s accessible for all,” Founder and CEO Gina Bartasi previously told Built In.
Most recent funding: In July, the company announced a $32 million Series B.
What were the most impactful technology investments you made — or plan to make — after your most recent round of funding?
We doubled headcount in IT and software development with more engineering hires on the way.
Why did you choose to make those investments?
Healthcare is expensive, opaque and wildly inefficient. Fertility care, in particular, is prohibitively expensive. The first way to bring down costs and increase transparency is to build technology that improves member experience and removes waste. Our technology also uses AI to predict treatment protocols. It provides consistent decision making across all of our locations, rather than anecdotal decision making, which is common in healthcare.
“We doubled headcount in IT and software development with more engineering hires on the way.”
What advice do you have for other CEOs looking to make technology investments using their raised funds?
If you’re a non-technical founder like I am, find a technical partner as early as possible. Technical founders can be hard to find, so look for board members who can assist or find a strong product leader who can help lead technology until you have a MVP.
Stephanie Tilenius, Founder & CEO of Vida Health
Company snapshot: Founded in 2014, the San Francisco-helmed healthtech company’s virtual platform puts users with chronic conditions in touch with licensed providers to help them manage conditions like diabetes, obesity and anxiety.
Most recent funding: In April, buoyed by demand for remote healthcare services, Vida secured $25 million.
What were the most impactful technology investments you made — or plan to make — after your most recent round of funding?
For Vida Health, it’s been all about scaling our team. Since our latest round of funding, we’ve made significant investments in our product and engineering teams. And so far, those investments have really paid off.
Why did you choose to make those investments?
The pandemic has led to a major acceleration within the digital health space. As a company, we needed to keep up with that acceleration across all of our teams. We’ve had to balance our tech platform growth with clinical growth and sales growth. They are all inextricably linked.
“For Vida Health it’s been all about scaling our team.”
What advice do you have for other CEOs looking to make technology investments using their raised funds?
My biggest piece of advice for other CEOs looking to make tech investments is to first look for tech that is a no-brainer, and invest in longer term innovation later — especially if you are in growth mode. What do I mean by no-brainer? The product needs to drive growth, retention, unit economics and long term value all at the same time. It drives increases in effectiveness and efficiency. In our case, we invest in solutions that drive growth, daily engagement, retention and clinical outcomes.
Matthew Carroll, Co-founder & CEO of Immuta
Company snapshot: Handling data responsibly requires adhering to privacy and security requirements. Immuta’s platform helps automate that process to ensure compliance in fields like healthcare, manufacturing and fintech.
Most recent funding: In June, the company — which has a location in Boston — announced a $40 million Series C led by new investor Intel Capital.
What were the most impactful technology investments you made — or plan to make — after your most recent round of funding?
Our use of capital is to create tools to make the life of the data engineer easier. We want to make it easy for them to access, transform and protect any data they may need. These tools need to work seamlessly with every cloud warehouse and data lake, and also make interactions with data scientists and compliance feel easy and streamlined. We are investing in engineering, product management, user experience and customer experience teams to deliver this vision.
“We believe the future of the data market is all about the data engineer.”
Why did you choose to make those investments?
In the B2B market, we’re seeing two macro trends in data, accelerated by COVID-19: adoption of cloud warehousing and the development of data products versus apps.
As enterprises adopt cloud warehousing, they must rebuild legacy business intelligence dashboards and business-critical data pipelines. This requires a surge in data engineers, which are hard to come by. Therefore, they are investing in tools to help data engineers optimize their output and also scale pipeline development and oversee performance. At the core of those needs are governance and security. Data engineers are just not prepared to understand decades of rules on data, and they yearn for automation to combine extract, load and transform (ELT) processes and data governance.
What advice do you have for other CEOs looking to make technology investments using their raised funds?
COVID-19 and SaaS have changed the way people buy software. Whether a consumer or a business, the buyer wants to try before being pushed to buy. And they certainly do not want their first experience with a product to be assigned to a sales representative. Technology companies must invest at the intersection of product, sales and customer success. They must make their product easy to enter and make the buying experience simple, pleasant and measurable. Companies who do this will be leaps and bounds ahead of their competitors.
SaaS is here and it’s multi-cloud. For those in B2B, your buyer wants to be able to procure in a SaaS model on top of any of the big three clouds. For a great multi-cloud experience, companies need to invest in ensuring that services across these clouds integrate seamlessly with their product, like auditing, security and authentication. This also requires a heavy investment in documentation, training and community features to ensure a buyer can procure without ever needing your team.
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