Investing in the future of sales with TigerEye
By Ching-Yu Hu, Partner, Next47
In November 2019, my friend Kent Ho introduced me to one of my idols — Tracy Young, the founding CEO of PlanGrid (a construction productivity software company that Tracy and CTO Ralph Gootee grew to $100M in ARR over 8 years before it was acquired by Autodesk for $875M). I couldn’t believe it.
Two years prior to PlanGrid’s launch, I had co-founded Skybox Imaging, an aerospace startup that designed, built, and launched high-res satellites (and that was later acquired by Google). The aerospace and construction industries are both heavily male-dominated, and I had closely followed PlanGrid’s evolution and eventual success — to see another female Asian-American founder scale her company was (and is) pretty rare and opened my eyes to what was possible. Tracy’s story (in her own words) has been a huge source of inspiration for me, countless other founders, and founders-to-be.
When Tracy and Ralph decided to leave Autodesk in 2020, we at Next47 were excited to find out what they would do next. The answer was TigerEye, which is a stealth startup in the salestech space and is tackling a problem that the co-founders acutely experienced at PlanGrid (join the TigerEye waitlist here). Over the course of a year, we were eager to introduce them to a number of C-Suites and sales leaders and serve as a sounding board for the team. Fast forward to today, we are excited to share that we have co-led TigerEye’s $30M Series A together with Initialized Capital.
Next47 backs many incredible first-time founders, but we’ve also been fortunate to partner with many repeat entrepreneurs who have exited their prior companies including Filip Kaliszan (CEO of Verkada, Geoff Schmidt (CEO of Apollo GraphQL), and Renen Hallak (CEO of Vast Data). We have seen many experienced founders leverage learnings from their prior companies in order to build even more impactful businesses, and we have full confidence that Tracy and Ralph’s grit and perseverance will take TigerEye far.
Onwards and upwards!
