Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

As more companies provide more API-first services, Moesif has developed a way for those companies to learn how their customers are utilizing them.

The San Francisco-based startup is adding to its capital raise Monday with the announcement of a $12 million Series A round led by David Sacks and Arra Malekzadeh of Craft Ventures. Existing investor Merus Capital, which led Moesif’s $3.5 million seed round in 2019, also participated in the round, bringing the company’s total raise to $15.5 million, Moesif co-founder and CEO Derric Gilling told TechCrunch.

Gilling and Xing Wang founded Moesif in 2017 and went through the Alchemist Accelerator in 2018.

Companies seeking data around API usage and workflow traditionally had to build that capability in-house on top of a tech like Snowflake, Gilling said. One of the problems with that was if someone wanted a report, the process was ad hoc, meaning they would file a ticket and wait until a team had time to run the report. In addition, companies find it difficult to accurately bill customers on usage or manage when someone exceeds the rate limits.

“We started to see people build on top of our platform and pull data on APIs, and they started asking us how to directly serve customers, like making them aware if they are hitting a rate limit,” Gilling added. “We started to build new functionality and a way to customize the look and feel of the platform.”

Moesif provides self-service analytics that can be accessed daily and features to scale analytics in a more cost-effective manner. Customers use it to monitor features to better understand when there are issues with the API, and there are additional capabilities to understand who is using the API, how often and who may be likely to stop using a product based on how they are using it.

The company is also now seeing its revenue grow over 20% month over month this year and adoption by more diverse use cases and larger companies. At the time of the seed round, the company was just getting started with analytics and user trials, Gilling said. Today, it boasts a customer list that includes UPS, Tomorrow.io, Symbl.ai and Deloitte.

The company has also gone from a team of two to nine employees, and Gilling expects to use the new funding to bolster that roster across engineering, sales, developer relations and customer success.

He is also focusing on being a thought leader in the space and is pushing go-to-market and building out a new set of features to monetize APIs and improve its dashboard to better differentiate Moesif from competitors, which he said focus more on server health versus customer usage.

As part of the investment, Craft Ventures’ Malekzadeh is joining Moesif’s board. She was introduced to Gilling by another portfolio company and felt Moesif fit into Crafts’ thesis on SaaS companies.

Malekzadeh’s particular interest is in developer tools, and while in her previous position working at a startup developing APIs, she felt firsthand the pain point of not being able to know how those APIs were being used, how much customers should be billed and “was always bugging the product and engineering teams for reports.”

Moesif didn’t exist at the time she worked at the startup, and instead, her company had to build it own tools that turned out to be clunky, while at the same time recruiting top engineers that didn’t want to take up their time with building something that wasn’t the company’s core product.

“The two founders are highly technical, but they provided great content on their website that helped me learn about them,” Malekzadeh added. “One of the interesting things about them is that even though they are technical, they speak the same language as a business user, which makes them special as a developer-first company. Just the growth in their revenue was super impressive, and their customer references were glowing.”

Scratchpad is an early-stage startup that wants to make it easier for sales people to get information into Salesforce by placing a notation layer on top of it. Today, it announced a $13 million Series A led by Craft Ventures with participation from Accel.

The company has now raised a total of $16.6 million, including the $3.6 million seed round we covered in October. Co-founder and CEO Pouyan Salehi says that he wasn’t really looking to add capital, but the investors understood his vision and the money will help accelerate the product roadmap.

“To be honest, it actually wasn’t on our radar to raise again so soon after we raised what I consider a substantial seed. We had plenty of runway, but we started to see a lot of bottom-up user growth, this bottom-up motion just really started to take hold,” Salehi told me.

He says that lead investor David Sacks, who has built some successful startups himself, really got what they were trying to do, and the deal came together fairly easily. In fact, the company caught the attention of Craft because they were hearing about Scratchpad from their portfolio companies.

The bottoms up approach is certainly something we have seen with developer tools and with software for knowledge workers, but companies often take aim at sales through the sales manager, rather than trying directly to get salespeople to use a particular tool. This approach of getting the end users involved early allows them to gain traction with members of the sales team before approaching management about paid versions.

Traditionally, sales teams don’t like the tools that are thrust upon them. They are essentially databases and even with a visual interface, it doesn’t really match up with the way they work. Scratchpad gives them an interface like a spreadsheet or notes application that they are typically using to hack together a workflow, but with a direct connection to Salesforce.

What the paid tiers provide is a way to bring all this data together and get a bigger-picture view of what’s happening on the sales team, and it helps ensure that people are using Salesforce because the data in Scratchpad links to the Salesforce database automatically.

The company has completed the initial work of building the individual salesperson’s workspace, but the next phase, and part of what this capital is going to fund, is building the team workspace and seeing how this data can flow from individuals to a team view to give management more insight into what their individual reps are doing. This includes notes, which usually don’t make it into Salesforce, but provide a lot of context about interactions with customers.

It’s resonating with thousands of users (although Salehi didn’t want to share an exact customer number just yet). Customers include Autodesk, Brex, Lacework, Snowflake and Twilio.

Sacks says that he liked the viral way the product has been spreading. “Once a rep starts using Scratchpad, two things tend to happen: it becomes a daily habit, and they share it with their teammates. This phenomena of viral spread is rare and indicates a very strong product-market fit,” he said in a statement.

Jason Green, co-founder and partner at Emergence, has made some solid enterprise SaaS bets over the years, long before it was fashionable to do so. He invested early in companies like Box, ServiceMax, Yammer, SteelBrick and SuccessFactors.

Just those companies alone would be a pretty good track record, but his firm also invested in Salesforce, Zoom, Veeva and Bill.com. One consistent thread runs through Emergence’s portfolio: They focus on the cloud and enterprise, a thesis that has paid off big time. What’s more, every one of those previously mentioned companies had a great founding team and successful exit via either IPO or acquisition.

I spoke with Green in June about his investment performance with enterprise SaaS to get a sense of the secret of his long-term success. We also asked a few of those portfolio company CEOs about what it has been like to work with him over time.

All in on SaaS

Green and his co-founders saw something when it came to the emerging enterprise SaaS market in the early 2000s that a lot of firms missed. Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff told a story in 2018 about his early attempts at getting funding for his company — and how every single Silicon Valley firm he talked to turned him down.

Green’s partner, Gordon Ritter, eventually invested in Salesforce as one of the company’s earliest investments because the partners saw something in the SaaS approach, even before the term entered the industry lexicon.

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