Growing, fundraising, and becoming one of the top data startups in Europe (Week 54)

I have been writing this blog for over a year now. Building Amygda out in the open. Open startups will be the norm for the next few years.

The journey of building Amygda began before we received funding, and so did this blog. On the 30th of June, 2020 I wrote the first piece about building Amygda. It’s now 5th July 2021 and here we are.

In the past 12 months of writing, as a team we’ve grown, we’ve changed, and we’ve reiterated what we are good at. I think we’ve learnt way more doing things than theorising about it in office.

On office – as a team, we’ve not spent a single day together since our inception. Some people had pandemic babies, and some of us had pandemic businesses. We started in a pandemic, talk about balls!

But the regular readers of the blog will know, I haven’t written for a while. Over two months now. The last post I wrote mentioned the enterprise customer we signed. It’s been a whirlwind since then. Busy is an understatement.

Where are we with Amygda now?

Amygda is in great shape. We have one enterprise client and we are finding the problem-solution fit. I am looking forward to a longer pilot with another key client by Q4 of 2021. This is going to validate our solution even further for the predictive maintenance/reliability problem we are dealing with.

Though we are a startup, our clients are large enterprises in the mobility and industrial space. Typically they own or operate £1B+ equipment. And the sheer size of the businesses we deal with mean we have a longer sales cycle.

Dealing with these is a hard job. And something we’ve done well, but I’ve also come to realise the importance of enterprise sales leaders.

At Amygda we will have a key leader for each vertical we operate in, and a sales and BD practice that wraps around the key leaders. Obviously, doing this at a pre-seed stage isn’t too viable.

We are now in a situation where we are more pull on our team. So we are growing the team. On the sales and technical side.

And also starting to fundraise our seed round.

We completed our pre-seed round earlier this year (Jan ’21). But as the need has grown, based on demand, we need to accelerate our roadmap faster.

Please drop me a line, comment, or email me (it shouldn’t be hard to guess my email on our domain name) with anything you believe could help us fundraise!

So, you are fundraising what round again?

We are fundraising seed round. What does it mean? Look, it’s a term the industry has slapped onto itself to segment startups into some sort of likeliness. Seed rounds range anywhere from hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of dollars.

For us, we are fundraising to grow the team to deliver on pilots we have in the pipeline, further embed ourselves in existing customers, and continue to innovate with the product development. We can’t stand still on product development.

The kind of investors that we want to partner with are:

  • previous investment in B2B space
  • experience of mobility or industrial space
  • invest in founders who are not Ivy League / similarly educated

It’s not a hard list, is it? Apart from the last point. That alone makes us as a team an outsider to the investment community.

But we will ride it, and raise.

If you can help, please do 🙂

Being one of Europe’s top data-driven startups

We are pleased to be selected as one of Europe’s top data-driven startups by TNW in the Data Market startup landscape map 2021.

Delivering A.I. and Machine Learning in 100 yr old industries is literally our gig.

So what’s next?

The journey of building Amygda continues. We are a small team, here’s our LinkedIn to follow us and keep a track of the jobs we are hiring for.