Venture Europe: Entrepreneurship | Technology | Venture Capital | Eu/Acc
00:30:09 · James Cadwallader, Calin Fabri
[00:30:09] S0: I know I know that meme. Yeah. [00:30:10] S1: So, like, the the comparison, like, with someone actually now typing code. And I also saw recently, it was like DHH, David Heinemeier Hansen, and he had a talk at the opening in Austin for Ruby on Rails. Okay. So so he compares the the moment that we live right now with the advent of the camera. His grand grandfather was an artist, so only royalty... Only if you were, like, royalty, you could have, like, a painting of your family. But then the camera came, and everyone could have a painting, you know, of your family. Also, now, like, with with AI, like, why why would you type? Of course, it takes a couple of iterations to your point, like, not to have the slop, but you can get there with skill.
00:30:51 · James Cadwallader, Calin Fabri
[00:30:51] S0: Yeah. I think people need to understand, like, what we're talking about in respect to our products. Like, you need to have... Like, the first thing you do inside of ProFound is you build a... We we have a a feature called context manager. Yep. So it's like a dynamic marketing focused context manager, which acts as a cohesive layer across your entire marketing team and understands your brand tone of voice, your design systems, your do's and don'ts, governance, you know, everything that if you brought a new marketer into your team, you'd have to tell the person this. Right? So it's this layer of understanding, of comprehension. And then what they're doing as well is they're integrating, you know, external platforms, third parties, internal data systems, all together to, like, be able to build, you know, content at scale, basically. So it's like, it's not as simple as just like prompting. Like, you wanna build a marketing system with agents that can do the work. [00:31:45] S1: Yeah. And then, like, do you have, like, multiple agents that do some specific tasks?
00:31:45 · Calin Fabri, James Cadwallader
[00:31:45] S1: Yeah. And then, like, do you have, like, multiple agents that do some specific tasks? [00:31:48] S0: Yeah. That's right. So you'd have, like, you know, a CMO might have an agent that goes and compares visibility across every single, you know, every single competitor in your space and tells you what they've done over the last seven days and then gives you action points of things you can do. Like, we work with a large Japanese electronics brand who, like, updated. So what they found, the Japanese electronics brand, you all know them. What they found is their product display pages are being cited all the time by AI systems. So they built an agent that could dynamically update the PDPs Right. With new information as they were, like, decaying in value, basically. So as the page became less cited, it gets refreshed Right. Right. Autonomously. [00:32:34] S1: And and let's talk a little bit about, like, the last fundraising round because you raised, like, €100,000,000 series d. [00:32:41] S0: And $1.01 $80. I don't know. I've never done it in euros. [00:32:45] S1: Yeah. $180? Yeah. And and, someone told me, like, from your team that you raised that, like, on a walk, which for a European pounder, that is just unthinkable. You know, you think more like the private equity type of you create a gym, 40 pages, but you did it on a walk. Like, do you wanna tell us the story?
00:32:45 · Calin Fabri, James Cadwallader
[00:32:45] S1: Yeah. $180? Yeah. And and, someone told me, like, from your team that you raised that, like, on a walk, which for a European pounder, that is just unthinkable. You know, you think more like the private equity type of you create a gym, 40 pages, but you did it on a walk. Like, do you wanna tell us the story? [00:33:03] S0: Yeah. I mean, I was at Sequoia do... They do this event called Base Camp, where they invite lots of founders. They had some great speakers like Jensen Huang came, Sam Altman came, Ken Griffin from Citadel was there. So that's some really good content. And there was a break, quite a long break. And I was just walking with a NASA partner, you know, and we're talking about the business. And I was saying, like, you know, at some point, we're probably gonna think about going out and, like, building a deck and raising around. But, yeah, those guys have, like, seen the aggression and, like, how we've been building and the growth of the business. Like, our revenue numbers are exciting. And, yeah, he was like, we should, you know, let's let's do it. So we kinda did it off off market. Well, I've done the I've done the deck the deck dance before. That's a very different type of affair. [00:33:56] S1: Like, someone in the team also told me that that you preferred the cartoon style more than the Dex style. Like, do you wanna tell us about the cartoon style?
00:33:56 · Calin Fabri, James Cadwallader
[00:33:56] S1: Like, someone in the team also told me that that you preferred the cartoon style more than the Dex style. Like, do you wanna tell us about the cartoon style? [00:34:03] S0: When we raised our series b, I mean, it wasn't really for anything. Like, it was this weird this is when the Ghibli, the the the chat GPT studio Ghibli thing was kicking off. I was basically trying to I was trying to articulate this platform shift from the human first Internet, where humans visit websites to an agent first Internet, where an agent, you know, you ask Instinct or Chat or Grok to tell you about a car you're considering buying, you're not gonna visit audi.com. You're not gonna visit Auto Trader, at least to begin with. You're gonna... The the agent will go and get all that information for you. There's quite a... There's parts of it. If you want to explain it well, it's kind of confusing. Yeah. So what I did is I just created almost like a cartoon series that, like, could explain the platform shift in a big way. Yep. And it was like 50 slides long, but I would just go through it fast. And, yeah, I showed it to Alfred Lin at Sequoia, and I... He said, can quote him. He said it was the best deck he's ever seen, which is a pretty big compliment. He's like, I see a lot of decks. Yeah. [00:35:07] S1: That's amazing. Well done. And and what does the next twelve months look like for you guys? Like, what's the focus right now? Just expanding the product, getting more market share?
00:35:07 · Calin Fabri, James Cadwallader
[00:35:07] S1: That's amazing. Well done. And and what does the next twelve months look like for you guys? Like, what's the focus right now? Just expanding the product, getting more market share? [00:35:16] S0: Yeah. Getting more market share, building a great product. You know, really, we we need we need to build for marketing what Adobe did back in the transition to cloud. Mhmm. This is a very ambitious project. It's like, can we build the canonical AI marketing platform for the enterprise? And, yeah, you know, enterprise marketers wake up right now and use a disparate number of platforms and tools, and we wanna build, like, one workbench where you make, manage, measure all of your marketing, both aimed at humans and agents eventually. So that take the whole thing. It should be agent first, AI first, AI native. So we've got like a... Yeah. We've we've got a good wedge in right now, but there's, like, lots more to do. [00:36:04] S1: And then when you are in the enterprise, like, what do you see that kinda excites you? Like, are... Like, the engagement numbers are that you see actually people from different teams bringing their, you know, colleagues in the platform seeing that you can bundle and get rid of all these other applications that have, like, a single use, and you can become the only platform where marketeers are there. What are the engagement numbers, or what are the metrics that you see that excites you?