Why We Invested in Ninety and How It’s Helping Create a World with More Exceptional Businesses
In August, Blue Cloud Ventures led a $35 MM growth round in Ninety. The round was joined by Catalyst Investors and Insight Partners. We could not be more excited to partner with Mark Abbott and his team on this journey.
When we first met Ninety last year, we were immediately impressed by the team, slick product, stellar customer reviews, and efficient growth. Ninety sells predominantly to companies leveraging the EOS framework (Entrepreneurial Operating System — a specific framework for companies to establish a cadence with performance management and goal-setting with an emphasis on its network of coaches to help implement the framework). While we were vaguely familiar with EOS, we did not truly understand the principles of the framework or the greater business coaching ecosystem. After spending more time researching and understanding the space, we realized the sheer scale of the opportunity Ninety was targeting. This is a $15 Bn industry where both clients and coaches still predominantly leverage email, Excel, pen-and-paper or retrofitted generic productivity tools to run their businesses, communicate and track performance. Ninety built the best solution to address this problem and is used by tens of thousands of companies globally.
While Ninety’s platform today is alluring in itself, what really got us excited is predominantly its founder and his vision. Leveraging a large customer base, incredible NPS scores, a unique company culture, and an aggressive product roadmap, Mark’s plan to build a multi-billion business was palpable, and this excited us.
Ninety’s platform provides a software system to create, implement, and manage a BOS (Business Operating System — any type of framework that a company leverages to establish a cadence with performance management and goal-setting). Ninety serves as the central hub for setting and tracking organizational goals, structuring meetings, documenting processes, and providing structured feedback. For companies that utilize a coach to implement a BOS (such as EOS), Ninety serves as a single pane of glass for coaches to gain visibility into their clients’ performance and progress.
Mark lived the problem Ninety is seeking to solve. Over the past three decades, Mark built multiple companies and invested in or advised hundreds of others. Through his work, he noticed there are similar inefficiencies businesses and entrepreneurs face and need to overcome to become successful, especially with SMBs.
For SMBs there is a slim margin of error — a poor business decision, an economic downturn or changes in competitive dynamics can be the difference between staying in business or going under. The entrepreneurs leading these companies face a unique combination of extreme pressure and responsibility along with an overwhelming number of tasks to complete each day.
In searching for answers, he came across EOS as a compelling solution. As a result, Mark became deeply involved in the ecosystem and started his own EOS implementation and business coaching practice. However, he was aware of the inefficiencies in existing pen-and-paper processes for companies and coaches and set out to build a dedicated software tool to help companies to run EOS. This was the foundation of building Ninety.
While Ninety got its start in EOS, it has since expanded into new markets and is selling to companies across the board that are looking to improve inefficiencies and improve organizational structure.
However, Mark’s vision for the company is much larger than this: Ninety has an aggressive product roadmap and seeks to incorporate continuous corporate learning, AI-powered business guidance, a robust data product to help companies benchmark performance metrics against other similar organizations, and more. Simply put, Ninety wants to be the central platform for running a business, all with the overarching goal of helping organizations across the board flourish.
As part of our diligence process, we spoke with dozens of Ninety’s customers, partners, and employees. Feedback was exceptional. Each customer spoke highly of Ninety with many stating they could not run their business effectively without the platform. Ninety became the core management tool for their organizations and it guided teams towards a central vision, something they often did not have before. Customers also noticed significantly less waste and interruptions during the work week. They credit Ninety for bringing organizational-wide buy-in and the confidence that their business is on track to success.
One of the unique characteristics of Ninety is its culture and discipline to stick to a set of core principles across every aspect of the business. Many companies have them, few live by them consistently and holistically. Mark intentionally built Ninety as a culture-first organization. When BCV spoke with the Ninety team, everyone said something along the lines of, “This is the best place I have ever worked.” The key reason for Ninety’s ability to build and maintain this culture as well as its relationship with customers and partners is its emphasis on these key operating principles. Ninety emphasizes understanding and serving their ideal stakeholders (team members, customers, vendor, partners, investors, communities) and building high-trust relationships with each of them. A core foundation of these high-trust relationships is transparency. For example, employees are updated on company performance and direction, customers are encouraged to share product feedback and ask about the product roadmap and individual partners are aware of the state of partner organization agreements.
Ninety is already having a tremendous impact on its users today and with the new round of funding, Ninety is accelerating its product roadmap to provide more value to customers. Ninety’s goal, simply put, is to create a world with more exceptional companies. It aims to become the go-to platform for every company to directly access best practices, guidance, and tailored benchmarking data specialized to their stage, industry, and current operational challenges. To support the vision of providing more companies the tools they need to become exceptional, BCV is excited embark on this journey with the Ninety team. Ninety itself has built an exceptional company from scratch and the culture and performance lays a solid foundation for the bright future ahead.
