When we last spoke with Explo, the firm was just about to announce its $2.3 million seed round. A lot has changed for the Y Combinator Winter 20 alum since that time in November 2020, when it was a very different period.
Even though the epidemic was at its worst, Explo managed to develop the product and attract its first clients. With the help of that product, you can create personalised business intelligence dashboards that reflect the brand identity of your firm and that you can then integrate on your website or send to clients through email.
At the time of the seed fundraising, Explo co-founder and CEO Gary Lin explained to us:
In terms of the user interface and the final product, we had to provide the capability for our end customers to construct dashboards, embed dashboards, and alter the aesthetics of these dashboards so that it seems and feels like it is a component of their own product.
When the firm went seeking for investment at the beginning of this year, Lin says one of the things they’ve learned along the road is that Explo is a sticky product, and it helped get the most recent $12 million Series A. Since our previous conversation, the team has been hard at work developing and marketing the product. In January of this year, they saw they were really gaining some momentum and decided it might be time to secure a Series a round of funding.
When they were seeking for finance, Lin claims that the venture market was beginning to chill, but they were lucky to receive a solid offer. “In reality, we didn’t observe the same effects that entrepreneurs do now. However, the temperature wasn’t quite as high as it had been in December of the previous year. I would therefore say that we were extremely fortunate in terms of timing, and we are grateful for that,” he said. This year’s March saw them win the round.
The business is also announcing today that a two-week trial of its self-service solution is now officially available. According to him, the firm presently has 45 paying clients and many more are actively testing the software. In order to have the information they need to examine for the free trials, the businesses link their databases or data warehouses. Therefore, Explo will establish a direct connection to these databases, whether they data warehouses like Snowflake or Postgres, and will then provide all of our clients with a variety of options to share data.
At least for now, Explo hasn’t noticed a slowing in the effects of the present economic climate. “We define the kind of product and kind of function that Explo does for consumers as a requirement, but not a core skill. Therefore, people are even more ready to outsource dashboarding and analytics to a solution like Explo as they want to ensure that their workforce…is concentrating on what’s important to their business. And as a result, sales haven’t really decreased but rather stayed steady, he added.
The objective, according to Lin, is to double the company’s current workforce of 15, but he will let performance determine that rather than setting a rigid target. He claims that in order to continue assembling a varied staff, the firm collaborates with a recruiter. According to him, locating individuals early in the process is crucial.
“We’re quite pleased of the team we’ve put together. And we’re happy to see that the crew has stayed quite diversified. One of the most important lessons we’ve learnt over the years is that the top of the funnel actually helps the most when it comes to hiring for diverse people,” he added. This entails surfacing a slate of varied candidates for each open post utilising a range of external sources from the start of the process.
Craft Ventures led the $12 million Series A today, with participation from Felicis Ventures, Amplo VC, and numerous business angels.
