Why We Invested in ReachFive & CIAM

We are so excited to announce our latest investment in Jérémy Dallois and the ReachFive team.

Founded in 2014 in Paris, ReachFive is an emerging Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) platform that is disrupting omnichannel marketing through SaaS-driven simplified consumer authentication and unified customer identity.

(As evidenced by the diversity of 20 years of Ventech entrepreneurs (by experience, geography, industry, gender, age, personality), there’s no ‘special formula’ we use as early stage investors. We believe this open mindedness, adaptivity and appetite for diversity have been crucial to our longevity as investors.

That being said, there are certain combinations of ‘ingredients’ that we’ve seen work very well together — so naturally, it’s a pleasure when we’re pitched by a team who shares and can execute on this vision.)

Jérémy and the team at ReachFive have impressed us from day one by prioritizing:

The right people…

Time and time again, we have seen that a startup is only as good as its ability to build a stellar team and secure savvy early adopters. For a product/solution to gain the momentum and impact required to be ‘leading-edge’, you need (1) talent and (2) directed exposure.

ReachFive’s founding team has incredible synergy, leveraging the backgrounds of experienced operators from Paris-based software successes (Talend, Neolane) and global megaplayers (Adobe, Salesforce). Through their contributions to the ascensions of Talend and Neolane and the global scaling of Adobe and Salesforce, the brains behind ReachFive learned from the best in class; this comprehensive knowledge and perspective forms everyday operations and vision at ReachFive.

Early enough access to good customers — to real thought leaders — helps entrepreneurs shape the right product.

ReachFive has capitalized on and built out its network through dedication to developing their core product. From the start, the company has maintained a vision to leverage the French retail ecosystem, which has produced enormous global leaders over the past 50 years.

Today, ReachFive is instrumental to over 40 [AM2] industry leaders (with customers including Boulanger, Etam, L’Occitane, Hachette Group, Sandro, Lacoste, Intersport, Engie, Norauto, OuiBus, Micromania, l’Olympique Lyonnais). Now, the firm is starting to look beyond retail into other verticals worldwide.

The right market…

We’ve been hearing about omnichannel marketing strategies for many years, and it’s finally actually happening; large retailers are now firing on all cylinders, selling offline, on-line, on desktop & on mobile, on their marketplaces, through hybrid approaches, … you name it, someone’s trying it.

Flipping the vantage point to the customer and getting straight to the crux of the issue: customers want, need and deserve ubiquity in their relationships with retailers. And at the core of enhancing the customer experience is efficient, unified identification and access.

For retailers, it’s hard and expensive enough to drive and monitor physical traffic, let alone wrangle (and then manage) online traffic. Naturally, when we throw an omnichannel strategy into the mix, marketing efficiency often goes out the window; just think of the joys of an offline loyalty program separate from your desktop customer profiles not connected to mobile app logins…[SS3] . Then let’s consider also the consolidation of online properties, multi-brand ownership from large groups, and even more channel expansion on the horizon…

Indeed, who (customer and retailer alike) wants a different customer profile for every brand owned by the same group?

Et voilà… meet the $14bn global CIAM market — and more specifically ReachFive’s CIAM solution: the platform that enables retailers to effectively use omnichannel marketing. Unified customer experience by understanding the customer from start to finish, on every platform.

The right timing…

The reality is that this is certainly not a new problem. The very day people started to sell on the internet, they wanted to identify and access their customers for the future and sought/implemented solutions to do so. And even looking to the offline world, in-store loyalty programs to identify and monitor clients, better serve return customers and appropriately target new customers have long been integral to marketing strategies of small and large retailers.

The CIAM market has already seen a (small) first wave of consolidation, with large global ISVs buying out some promising market leaders. But, as always in enterprise software, this CIAM wave is gaining force as it meets its next strong wave — one focused on building natively cloud-based players.

We are thrilled to support ReachFive as the first natively cloud-based provider of CIAM solutions as they scale at the perfect moment for the evolution and momentum of this market.

And the right mindset.

It’s full steam ahead for Jérémy and the ReachFive team, and we couldn’t be prouder to be part of the next step of their story.

Through the team’s collective ambition and drive, and with the assistance of a (carefully chosen) capital infusion, ReachFive is ready for global deployment (domination J ) via (1) the expansion of existing customers into new geographies and (2) new partnerships with huge players worldwide.

Here at Ventech, we’re leveraging the collective knowledge of our global team (French, American, Chinese, Finnish, German) and the strength of our local reach (through meaningful relationships and well-honed market intelligence in France, China, Germany & the Nordics) to be the best partner we can to ReachFive. We’re lucky to co-invest with our friends at CapHorn Invest (who add direct commercial connections to decision makers through their strong European network) and Dawn Capital (who add deep expertise in and passion for B2B and FinTech entrepreneurs in Europe) to accelerate this growth.

The bottom line:

It’s a true pleasure to find investment opportunities with a great founding team, disruption of a large addressable market, superior market traction with top tier customers, and a solid international syndicate of dedicated early stage VCs. Music to our ears!! 🎧 🎧 🎧

We believe that ReachFive uniquely holds the 🔑 to successfully navigating omnichannel as the future of CIAM. We feel lucky to be partners in their journey, and look forward to working with ReachFive, CapHorn and Dawn to take on the next chapter of omnichannel marketing worldwide !