Operator.VC, the angel fund recently founded by local tech veterans Mike Volpe and Yoav Shapira, announced its first investment: Privy, a Boston-based startup focused on email marketing tools. Operator.VC led the funding round, the amount of which is undisclosed, with participation from KiwiVenture Partners II’s Bill Cohen and Todd Breeden.
According to Privy’s funding announcement, this most recent round comes as the company hits a milestone: 60,000 users are using its product to grow their email marketing lists. Looking ahead, Privy writes, “We’ll be using the proceeds from this new round to continue scaling our list growth product and accelerate towards our vision of consumer focused, SMB marketing automation.”
Volpe told BostInno he had personally made a previous investment in Privy, with this recent capital being a follow-on investment for Operator.VC. He wrote in an email, "Privy has some of the best looking SaaS metrics I have ever seen in the SMB space. The holy grail of SMB SaaS is virality and ultra-low-cost customer acquisition, and Privy has cracked that code. Privy feels to me like SurveyMonkey or MailChimp before they were famous. They just quietly build a great product with a great low cost growth model. Then 5 years later people wake up and say, 'Holy crap, that's an amazing business.'"
In a Medium post about the investment, Volpe explained Operator.VC never planned to be a lead investor "but when you are operators who write checks (and aren’t VCs who have LPs to answer to) you can do whatever the f*ck you want and we’re happy to be unconventional if we believe in something.”
This clarification echoes Volpe and Shapira's words when they announced the start of Operator.VC this past summer. Despite the misleading name, they emphasize it is in fact an angel fund, not a VC fund, and they have no intention of raising outside capital.
Previously, Privy has also received funding from Hubspot (where Volpe was formerly the chief marketing officer), Accomplice and 500 Startups. The latest round brings Privy's total funding to $3 million, according to Ben Jabbawy, its founder and CEO.
