An Early-Stage VC

FKA Oryzn Capital

Overview

Nanorep offers a self-service engagement SaaS platform aimed at enhancing user experience by delivering instant, contextual answers. This platform leverages a robust NLP engine and integrates data across touchpoints, supporting large enterprises with extensive service demands. After the recent appointment of Eli Campo as CEO, Nanorep shifted its focus from SMBs to enterprises, where demand for scalable, automated support solutions is higher. This transition includes an expanded management team, and a strong pipeline with projected 3x revenue growth to exceed $7M in ARR by the end of 2015.

We initially invested in Nanorep in September 2014 when invited by Eli Campo – who knows us well and thought we could be a valuable partner – to participate in an internal round. After working with the company for the past 5 months, we are excited to lead this round. We believe Nanorep is well positioned to be a leading player in an emerging enterprise category. It has a unique product and a strong team, and we like the idea to buy in at what could be the inflection point for the company. Moreover, we believe the suggested deal, with a $14M cap, represents an attractive multiple of approx. 5x ARR, allowing a meaningful upside due to both revenue growth and increase in multiple.

Product Offering

Nanorep’s NLP-powered platform delivers precise answers rather than lengthy search results. Unlike conventional search engines, Nanorep’s platform is designed for query resolution, integrating data from knowledge bases, CRMs, and user interactions into a single interface. It employs advanced analytics for real-time behavior insights, enhancing customer engagement with an average of 25% conversion lift and 30% reduction in support costs. The solution is accessible across all digital touchpoints, including web, mobile, and app-based integrations, providing a consistent, enterprise-grade experience.

Unlike most search engines that are designed for information delivery and provide 10-30 related results at a time, Nanorep is designed for instant resolution: 1 question = 1 answer. To be able to provide this type of experience, Nanorep has developed an advanced NLP engine, allowing it to analyze and understand massive amount of text. The company also offers an advanced analytics tool that provides visibility into changes and trends of user behavior in real time.

Market Opportunity and Go-to-Market

With the rise of SaaS and customer-facing digital solutions, businesses are increasingly prioritizing customer experience over traditional agent productivity models. The demand for self-service engagement is high, as evidenced by trends showing 67% of users prefer finding answers independently. The need spans across verticals such as e-commerce, finance, and gaming, suggesting a vast TAM as companies like Gainsight and Totango validate the adjacent customer success category. Nanorep’s focus on converting unstructured queries into actionable answers positions to capture early traction in this emerging self-service domain. Nanorep’s strategy combines online acquisition for mid-market with field operations in the U.S. to attract enterprise clients. A proposed “land-and-expand” model through initial free ticketing solutions could increase platform adoption, with self-service automation offerings driving monetization.

Competition

Competitive differentiation is strong in the self-service niche, where players like Marketo focus on marketing automation, and Totango on customer success. Key competitors are often lacking Nanorep’s blend of NLP and analytics in self-service.

Direct Competitors:

Team

CEO Eli Campo, formerly EVP at LivePerson, has spearheaded Nanorep’s pivot, leveraging his extensive domain expertise and operational acumen. His leadership, supported by Larry King (SVP Sales) and Dana Ilovich (VP Online Marketing), has stabilized the company and positioned it for strategic growth. Future hires include a CMO and VP R&D to further strengthen the team.

Scenario Analysis

Deal Structure

Summary: why are we excited?

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Overview

Many large organizations rely on Excel-based tools alongside CRM/ERP/BI systems, leading to manual errors, data integrity risks, and duplication issues. These tools operate separately from Data Warehouses, complicating tasks like data aggregation.

Datarails solves this by transforming spreadsheets into an enterprise-grade solution with governance, workflow management, and advanced analytics. Their SaaS platform enhances collaboration and business intelligence without disrupting current workflows.

Market Problem & Opportunity

In 2016, enterprises continued moving to cloud solutions and advanced collaboration tools, but many still relied on spreadsheets, often shared via emails. These Excel files operated in silos, creating multiple versions of critical documents like budget plans, disconnected from centralized data systems.

DataRails aims to bridge this gap by empowering managers to use Excel for business processes without relying on IT. Excel’s flexibility allows users to adapt workflows easily, but it introduces risks, including incorrect or fraudulent data and inefficiencies in workflows and visibility. Sharing multiple versions and manually copying data leads to errors and a disconnect from enterprise analytics.

Nearly every large organization uses spreadsheets, especially for financial and sales operations, and many feel the pain of these inefficiencies. A notable example is JPMorgan’s $2 billion loss in 2013, caused by a copy-paste error in their Excel-based financial model, where a simple miscalculation resulted in huge financial consequences. This highlights the risks of manual spreadsheet management, as explored in Forbes’ article on why Excel could be the most dangerous software in business.

The Solution & Technology

DataRails streamlines enterprise Excel-based processes with a solution that includes workflow management, governance, and real-time error and fraud detection. It consolidates multiple Excel files into a “single source of truth,” displayed in web-based dashboards.

The system operates through a badge that continuously monitors spreadsheets for data integrity, structure, and permissions, applying business rules in real time. It also offers cloud-based version management and data aggregation, enabling analytics across multiple spreadsheets.

The technology, supported by provisional patents, converts Excel’s unstructured data into a structured SQL database, providing powerful insights and ensuring data consistency.

Customers & Use Cases

DataRails is primarily used in operations, finance, and HR for tasks like budget planning, supply management, revenue forecasting, and performance reviews. The company currently has 3 live customers, 8 in the pipeline post-validation, and 3 reseller partnerships.

One notable implementation is at Mul-T-Lock, a company with ~1,000 employees and 12 branches. Before DataRails, sales data aggregation was manual, requiring analysts to combine multiple Excel versions. Now, DataRails automates data integrity checks, error corrections, and workflows, integrating the data into web-based dashboards. Mul-T-Lock’s CIO highlighted the transformation, with two more use cases in progress and three additional ones in the queue.

Go to Market and Competitive Landscape

DataRails targets IT departments and CIOs due to its ease of implementation and ability to enhance Excel-based tools within enterprises. The company recently hired a VP of Sales and is recruiting a Head of Marketing. Their go-to-market strategy focuses on inside sales, alongside building partnerships with top-tier resellers to reach larger organizations.

Team

CEO & Founder: Didi Gurfinkel, combines technical and business expertise. Previously COO of Jungo for 4.5 years, which was acquired by Cisco, where he then served as Director and GM for nearly two more years.

CTO & Co-Founder: Oded Har-Tal, comes with extensive experience in senior R&D roles across companies like Polycom and various other firms, both large and small.

CPO & Co-Founder: Eyal Cohen, one of the founders of WalkMe, a successful Israeli startup.

Scenario Analysis

Deal Structure

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Overview

OwnBackup is an early-stage company, offering a service to backup data stored on SaaS platforms. The company started as a services company for data restoration, but with the increased demand for cloud solutions, decided to take advantage of the technology they have developed and the team’s unique expertise around data management and protection to launch ownBackup. Company is now out to raise its first financing round to build the sales and marketing infrastructure and accelerate growth.

We find the ownBackup opportunity attractive for several reasons. The company has a proven technology targeting a nascent market that is expected to grow quickly in the coming years, driven by the massive trends around enterprise data (hyper-growth, big data, etc.) and the adoption of SaaS. The space is highly acquisitive, with acquirers ranging from traditional IT vendors to emerging SaaS platforms, and we also believe ownBackup is well positioned at this stage with nice early traction and recognition by Gartner.

Market Opportunity

The enterprise backup market, valued at $5 billion, is led by established companies like Symantec, IBM, and Dell. However, as more businesses move to SaaS (Software-as-a-Service), these vendors have been slow to offer backup solutions for SaaS platforms, creating an opportunity for new players.

The SaaS market is growing rapidly at an 18% annual rate and is expected to hit $50 billion by 2018. Despite this growth, SaaS providers offer only basic backup options, often leaving enterprises vulnerable. This opens the door for specialized backup solutions that can manage all enterprise data across multiple SaaS platforms from a single console. Such platforms would also offer better data protection, compliance, and control, addressing issues like vendor lock-in.

While the market for SaaS backup solutions could reach $500-750M by 2018, adoption may be slower, particularly among small and medium businesses (SMBs). However, there’s potential for higher growth if these platforms expand beyond just backup into broader data management.

OwnBackup pre-seed investment Offering

OwnBackup began as a data restoration service, building strong expertise and scalable technology to detect data corruption and restore data without affecting legitimate changes. The system has been tested with thousands of users and is designed to scale for large enterprises.

Initially targeting SMBs, OwnBackup focused on Gmail, social media, and Salesforce. However, strong traction with Salesforce customers led them to pivot toward enterprise platforms. They recently launched ServiceNow and plan to add Concur, Workday, and Netsuite soon. While the technology easily supports relational data apps, they are working on adapting it to file-based applications like Google Apps and Office 365, with an estimated timeline of three months.

Competitive landscape

There are three key groups in OwnBackup’s market:

OwnBackup stands out with full-org restoration and 24-hour backup cycles, leading innovation in the nascent SaaS backup space.

Go to market and traction

Since launching on Salesforce AppExchange, OwnBackup has seen promising organic traction, though without a marketing and sales strategy, growth has been inconsistent and hard to predict. This early interest suggests potential product-market fit, but key SaaS metrics like CAC remain unmeasured.

The company is now focusing on developing a go-to-market strategy, targeting enterprises with 1,000+ employees (deals over $20K/year) due to their larger SaaS deployments, IT policies, and compliance needs. The plan involves a “land and expand” strategy—starting with backup for one platform and upselling additional services. They aim to build a U.S. inside sales team to capitalize on inbound leads, but lead generation and sales effectiveness remain untested.

Team

Sam Gutmann (CEO) – joined the company about 6 months ago and is based in NY. Was founder and CEO of Intronis, which offers data protection solutions. The company has over 100 employees, and is supported by CRV and OpenView.

Ariel Berkman (CTO) – started in 2006 the data recovery service and led it successfully until recently. CS graduate from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and an alumni of elite technology unit in the Israeli army.

Additional: Ori Yankelev, Eran Cohen, Daniel Gershuni.

Deal Terms

Scenario Analysis

Summary

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