Our investment in Next Matter and the future of operations

You probably know the pain-point well: you have a dozen unanswered emails hanging in cyberspace; you are saddled with repetitive paperwork; you have limited visibility over tasks others are handling; and all of your team mates are struggling in the same way. Chaos.

Operations teams experience this every day. Their complex workflows — which often involve other departments, third parties, and tasks across both the digital and real worlds — are handled by a patchwork of basic processing and communications tools that are not fit for purpose. These teams, the keystone of any high-functioning business, are critically underserved by dedicated software platforms and automation.

As a team of former operators, this problem really got under our skin at OMERS Ventures. We have invested in dedicated automation platforms for other enterprise teams, such as customer support with Ultimate, tax with Fonoa, and delivery management with Deliverect. And as big believers in the future for automation at work in general, we also invested in a Canadian business, Wrk, that helps organisations automate discrete, individual actions that clutter so much of the workday. My colleague Laura Lenz wrote about it here.

In early 2021 we set out to find a team focused on making the lives of operations teams easier; a team building software to centralise these processes, orchestrate them between departments and team members, automate workflows that did not require human intervention, and alleviate operations workers of repetitive tasks so that they could be liberated to focus on higher value work.

We were thrilled, therefore, when we first meet Jan Hugenroth, founder of Next Matter, in February 2021. Our call had been answered: a former operator frustrated by the inefficiency of operational processes, Jan built himself a simple tool to centralise and automate them. He quickly realised the value of what he had built, seeing how it could both reduce costly mistakes and repetitive tasks, as well as giving more time back to operations employees. He quit his job to focus on building the product full-time.

Next Matter today is a powerful, end-to-end automation platform for operations teams that counts the likes of Trade Republic, wefox and Spreetail among its customers. Since we first met Jan, the business has grown more than 25% month over month and we have got to know him really well.

It is rare to find a founder like Jan who combines business intelligence with deep product know-how and a passion for detail. It had become obvious after a couple of meetings that we had to find a way to partner with him, as he continued to attract incredible talent to his team and new customers to the platform.

We are delighted to announce that OMERS Ventures is leading Next Matter’s $16m Series A, with strong support from their existing investors, BlueYard and Crane Venture Partners. Next Matter now has strong foundations to build a category-defining software business and we are excited for the pathway ahead, especially since we have become users of the platform ourselves!

Whether a pall is drawn over the macroeconomic environment or the economy bounces back, Next Matter is well-positioned for either scenario, capable of helping businesses cut costs and increase efficiency just as well as it can drive additional revenues. If you are interested in joining a company that can truly change a landscape and that is building for the long-term (as Jan writes about here), check out their jobs board — they are hiring now across their remote-first team for multiple roles.