When the market is pulling you, you know you’re onto something – and when that pull is so strong that you find yourself starting to be swept away, it’s time to reach out for help.
We raised our $12.8M Series A with Volition capital because of this very reason. GRAX is the fastest growing application in Salesforce’s history – we are being deployed by some of the most iconic, household name brands in just about every industry – companies on the Global 2000 and Fortune 500 list… it’s incredible!
If you look at just the Salesforce data backup market (which is honestly a very small percentage of what GRAX will ultimately deliver), at our current growth rate, we should be at a run rate at least equal to all of our major competitors combined by the end of 2020.
So what is it that we saw, and that they didn’t?
If you’ve read about our origin story, you’ll recall that the basic premise of why GRAX exists is to let you notice patterns in data as it changes over time. There are two other pieces to the puzzle that make GRAX unique: 1. we let our customers ACTUALLY OWN their backup data and 2. we let them keep that data live and hot right alongside their regular data. You can read more about what makes GRAX unique, but the basic idea is that we didn’t fall into the same ‘ego traps’ that our competitors did, and our customers love us for that.
Now back to the financing. We have a vision and a product-market fit that is creating really strong market pull for our product – but to date, other than the money that my partner, Joe and I have put into the business, we haven’t had any capital infusion. We’ve been bootstrapping growth, reinvesting all revenue right back into scaling the business. We didn’t pay ourselves any salaries – we reinvested everything… and about 3 months ago, we came to a cross-roads – we realized that GRAX’s growth is only continuing to accelerate – we weren’t reinvesting fast enough to keep pace with the business. We needed growth capital to help us catch up to where the company was headed – we weren’t building a multi-million dollar company…we were building a multi-BILLION dollar company.
This is where the team at Volition Capital truly shines – their focus and expertise in helping companies like GRAX sustain hypergrowth is unmatched. I honestly believe that we could not have picked a better partner than Volition Capital for our Series A financing – they just ‘get it’ – all of it. Partnering with the Volition team will allow GRAX to keep pace with our current growth curve, while scaling the team, product and go-to-market strategy to a whole new level.
So many tech companies these days raise money just to keep going – it’s funny but I was talking to a vendor that, upon hearing about our capital raise, immediately started to invoice us for his work – he’d never been so prompt with his invoices in the past. It made me chuckle – he thought that we needed the money to keep the lights on! And the sad truth is that so many tech companies are just like that – raising $30M, $40M or $50M across multiple rounds just to keep the lights on while generating $15-$20M in revenue. Their burn rates are outrageous. What’s the path to ROI for those investments? How long is that journey going to be?
At GRAX, we don’t suffer from that disease. We’re not going to get a lavish office with a Starbucks barista in our lobby – we are taking every penny of that $12.8M and investing it in growing GRAX into the multi-billion dollar company that it will be.
Then we can get the barista!
