Boston-based machine learning startup Indico, founded in 2014 by a group of Olin College engineers, has brought in a $22 million Series B round as it wraps on its "best year ever," to quote CEO Tom Wilde.
The round was co-led by Jump Capital and Sandbox Ventures.
At the beginning of the year, Indico set out specific milestones around the growth of its business and the maturity of its product, Wilde said. Then, the Covid-19 pandemic hit, forcing the startup to press pause. Indico put a hiring freeze in place and kept working to build out its product, a software tool that analyzes unstructured data and turns it into actionable insights for enterprise companies. The startup also put its fundraising plans on hold as investors tightened their purses during Q1 and Q2.
Then, toward the end of Q2, Wilde and his team "started to notice something interesting," he said. Their customers were all renewing their contracts with Indico, even as they made cuts elsewhere.
"It turns out that while the pandemic has been such a huge scale of human tragedy, it is also a major catalyst for major enterprises trying to figure out their operational resiliency," Wilde said. "After they kind of got their feet under them, they started to reassess and see that automation and digital transformation, which had already been growing categories, had become critical categories."
The new interest in Indico's tools marked a huge boom for the startup. Suddenly, 2020 was a banner year in essentially every category: customer acquisition, contract size, new hires and product releases.
Indico seized on that growth to raise its Series B round, which closed on Nov. 30. The funding will go toward hiring 30 to 40 new employees — doubling the startup's current headcount — by the end of 2021. Although the focus will be on growing the sales and marketing teams, Indico will also hire new engineers and data scientists.
Indico has been operating remotely since the start of the pandemic, and Wilde expects the company will go to a "remote-first" culture permanently, with a new, but smaller, headquarters in Boston opening next year. Still, Wilde plans to keep a "fairly large emphasis" on hiring in Boston.
"Boston continues to be a great place to build software companies," he said. "The fact that we have such great access to the kind of investors we have, and the sort of explosive growth in the automation segment here — it’s a great recipe for Boston success."
