Welcome and congratulations, Mutiny!
“When you know, you know”. This saying is true for many things in our personal lives but it also holds for when investors meet very special entrepreneurs.
I was first introduced to Jaleh and her co-founder Nikhil by our mutual friend Adam Nelson who had studied with her at the GSB. Jaleh was employee #12 (and the first marketing leader) at Gusto and had seen first-hand the gap in growth marketing tools for modern SaaS startups. So, with Nikhil and a growth engineering team, had built a bunch of internal tools to fill the gaps.
At Uncork, we love the concept of productizing the tools that the best companies in the world build for themselves and making them available to everyone else as-a-service (e.g. LaunchDarkly for feature flagging, Shippo for shipping management, SendGrid for email deliverability): “Give every company in the world a technology superpower usually reserved for the few”.
It was clear that in Mutiny’s initial product — a tool that helps SaaS companies personalize their website for each visitor, in order to convert the 99% of traffic that currently bounces — the founders had struck upon the early beginnings of what could become a very important company in the new B2B marketing stack.
It was also very clear from our first meeting (over breakfast burritos at Uno Dos Tacos in San Francisco, because I’m a real classy guy) that Jaleh ticked so many of the boxes we love to see in founder CEOs: an immigrant to the US who had studied engineering and business at Cal and Stanford, a technologist turned product marketer trained at a Silicon Valley institution (VMWare) before joining a rocketship-in-the-making (Gusto) where she built software to create an unfair marketing advantage. Couple this with an incredible co-founder CTO in Nikhil who saw the Gusto story play out first-hand alongside Jaleh and you have a team that knows the problem cold and ships software like the very best.
We seeded the company out of YC’s Summer 2018 batch (three years ago — time flies!) alongside our dear friends at Cowboy Ventures and today Mutiny is publicly announcing their Series A financing led by the venerable Sequoia Capital with participation from some of the world’s smartest technology CMOs including leaders from Snowflake, Salesforce and Carta.
Beyond the new cash, Mutiny is also announcing a broad vision for their no-code platform that can help any company solve the hardest problem in today’s marketing world: how do you effectively convert top-of-funnel demand into real revenue.
You can read a lot more about their vision in the company’s blog post and this Forbes piece. Please join me in congratulating Jaleh, Nikhil and all of the Mutineers, and officially welcoming my friend Bogomil Balkansky of Sequoia Capital to the party.
— Andy
