Welcoming Komiko to the Founders’ Co-op family

I’m delighted to announce that Founders’ Co-op has just completed an investment in Komiko, a Redmond-based company that uses machine learning to bridge the structured tables and workflows of Enterprise CRM platforms with the messy, unstructured data that lives in company email, calendars and documents.

As a fund we continue to see huge opportunities at the intersection of enterprise process automation and large-scale data analysis using emerging machine learning + AI techniques. 

Examples of related investments for us include Outreach (top-of funnel sales automation), Simply Measured (social media marketing), Tune (mobile marketing), Apptentive (mobile customer engagement) and Bluecore (email + direct response marketing).

An equally exciting opportunity – applying the same approach – exists in the $30B+ enterprise CRM market. Large-scale, account-based enterprise sales and customer success teams often have many touchpoints across the customer organization over an extended period of time. Manually logging all of these in a system of record is every salesperson’s least favorite activity, so the team’s understanding of the customer relationship is often missing critical pieces at just the wrong time.

The Komiko team understands this problem very deeply as a result of their long-standing executive leadership roles on SAP and Microsoft’s CRM product teams; they bring world-class product skills and deep customer understanding to an area that’s likely to be a strategic battlefield over the next several years (as evidenced most recently by Microsoft’s $26B purchase of LinkedIn, a deal that was hotly contested by cloud CRM leader Salesforce).

Komiko is attacking one of the biggest pain points in enterprise CRM — automated data enrichment of customer records — with the most sophisticated data mining and machine learning techniques available, ‘automagically’ enriching customer records with current, accurate and actionable information about who, where, and when those customers are interacting with team members across the organization.

We’re delighted to be working with such a talented team on such a large and valuable problem, and equally delighted that they chose to build their business here in the Pacific Northwest.