Battery Ventures

So I wanna cut straight into it.

You know, before Decibel, you were at Battery Ventures, and you backed the very well-known Databricks, and I would like for you to tell the audience, like, how did you get in that deal? How did you know that that was going to be what is effectively a centicorn at this point now? Um, walk us through that story.

Yeah.

One of the things that I've always really appreciated about, um, you know, working at Battery Ventures is that, uh, the firm was very thematically driven, and, um, that has very much shaped the way I invest even today.

Uh, one of the core theses that we had, um, coming into the space was really around, um, the evolution of Spark and how data was being processed, in particular in the cloud.

Um, and in that same context, one of the core theses that we had in conjunction with that was really around open source and the proliferation of how software was being consumed by developers and data engineers.

its growing suite of modular products connect on one AI-powered platform so distributors can grow revenue, protect margins, and give their people time back.

The company is backed by Felicis, and Battery Ventures.

In this episode of our podcast, we cover lots of great topics, like key advice on building a vertical AI company and why you must know your customer well enough to do their job, Benj's background growing up in Pennsylvania, and what he learned from the family business, building on top of legacy green screen mainframes and pulling multi-source data into an AI native stack, how Proton expanded from their original CRM application to other products and the decision around the timing to do so, the importance of having core company values that actually have meaning and how it translates into an effective hiring strategy, Proton's go-to-market approach, and so much more.

All right, now a brief word from our podcast sponsor.

More than 20 native signal types, AI scoring across accounts and contacts, and an outbound agent called GemE that turns those signals into pipeline.

The company has raised over $22 million from Kraft Ventures, Battery Ventures, Tiger Global, and Encore Capital.

And this year, it went headless, exposing the whole platform over MCP.

So it runs inside Cloud.

And at 30 million, I would say their valuation is going to be roughly about 300 million, which is slightly on a lower side.

But you have some very seasoned software investors involved, which is going to be Battery Ventures.

And then you have raised to 45 million since 2018 inception.

So that is the inception date.