HELIXintel plans to continue its rapid growth after closing a $4 million seed round.
The Buffalo-based company with 12 employees uses technology to help companies track and maintain equipment.
HELIXintel plans to use its cash to fuel a national expansion, an effort that requires investment across the company. One of the investors was Motivate Venture Capital, led by Western New York native Lauren DeLuca, who now lives in Chicago.
Motivate Venture's first fund invested in 42 companies, including Buffalo-based Kangarootime and HELIXintel. It is now heading into its second fund.
DeLuca talked about how HELIXintel attracted his attention and where it goes from here.
What do you see in the HELIXintel team?
At the pre-seed stage where we like to invest, team is everything – full stop. Great founders like (CEO Jon DeWald and President Michael Mainier) have a big, compelling vision — and often, not much else — but can nonetheless attract talent and resources to join them on the journey. It's always amazing to see founders influence both investors and teammates to ignore the risk and take the leap alongside them.
Experience is a double-edged sword. We love the battle scars on 2x founders, but sometimes the trade-off for domain expertise is lack of creativity and flexibility that a new founder to the space might bring. Jon and Mike looked at an unsexy $175 billion market and built a winning solution for every market participant. In this case, their collective domain experience combined with their creativity and audaciousness has so far been incredibly well-received by investors and, most importantly, early customers and partners.
B2B startups aren’t always sexy from the outside. Why are they exciting from a venture capital perspective?
My partner and I have built software and services for both SMBs (small- and mid-sized businesses) and enterprises. So investments that simplify the lives of an owner-operator, SMB buyer or corporate customer are always sexy to us. Granted, they don't impress people at cocktail parties.
The economics of recurring-revenue software businesses are incredible – hardly a secret – so investors love them. We get especially excited to see the anti-fragility of these startups emerge as the products mature and increasingly solve real, longstanding problems for customers. When a customer sees true bottom-line results, expressed in dollars, time or sanity, their willingness to pay is legitimate and they'll stick around for a long time.
Where is HELIXintel headed, from your perspective?
With Munich Re Ventures as investor and distribution partner, I see this as the preferred asset tracking and maintenance platform for SMBs, especially the 1M MunichRE customers. There's also an opportunity to streamline payments between customers, service providers, manufacturers and insurance. Helix will ultimately become the centralized asset tracking, maintenance, and payments hub for asset owners and stakeholders, starting with the $175 billion HVAC industry.
Hard not to love this business.
