Our Investment in Mark43
General Catalyst to co-lead $1.95M round
I am very happy to announce that General Catalyst is co-leading a $1.95M investment in Mark43 - a mobile first SaaS platform for law enforcement professionals. The company was started by Scott Crouch, Matt Polega and Florian Mayr in a design seminar at Harvard. The team has spent the last year shadowing police officers and doing customer development to determine ways in which technology can help those in law enforcement. With this funding Mark43 will take the learning from the last year to bring its product to market.
I was initially introduced to Scott by Zach Hamed this past winter. In my first meeting with Scott, I was simply blown away by his passion, focus and progress. He was truly committed to making Mark43 (which at the time was called Nucleik) successful and had laser focus on a market plagued by legacy software. Scott was looking for some initial funding to help cover expenses during the semester and ease the team’s transition to working on Mark43 fulltime. I immediately thought of RoughDraft.vc an initiative launched by General Catalyst for students in Boston. The team at Rough Draft similarly loved Scott’s energy and customercentric approach. The student partnership committed to an investment within 24 hours of hearing the Mark43 pitch.
General Catalyst has been fortunate to spend time with Mark43 over the last few months. During this time, Scott and his team have made tremendous progress signing up pilots with a number of law enforcement agencies across the country while developing v2 of their platform. The more time we spent with the team, the more excited we became about the investment opportunity.
Specifically, at General Catalyst we decided to invest due to our belief in four core areas.
- Within our portfolio we have seen the benefit of cloud based software delivered via a SaaS model in many sectors (such as e-commerce with Demandware, BI with GoodData and marketing with HubSpot). We believe over time many additional verticals will make the move to cloud based software and there continue to be opportunities to build substantial businesses within many new verticals.
- Mark43 is taking a mobile first approach to the law enforcement market. Police officers are true mobile workers and must spend a significant amount of time away from their desks. The ubiquity of powerful smartphones provides a nascent opportunity to build native mobile tools for this mobile workforce.
- Data within the law enforcement world remain siloed and difficult to access. Mark43 can help police officers leverage new technology to better capture, organize and analyze data in their work. Over time there will be a strong network effect to the Mark43 platform.
- Scott, Matt and Florian are precisely the type of first time founders we like to back. They are technical and product focused with an unrelenting ambition and passion to use technology to solve a big problem.
We will be co-leading the round with Spark Capital and are being joined by a fantastic group of additional investors including: RoughDraft.vc, SV Angel, Launchpad LA, Lowercase Capital and a handful of angels from the Boston community. We are excited to partner with Mark43 to build a business that will make the world a better place by revolutionizing the technology used by law enforcement professionals.
Here is a link to the full press announcement and if you are interested in transforming the technology used in law enforcement you can find job openings here.
