A predictive analytics company founded 10 years ago, at the dawn of a sustained period of economic growth, did even better when the pandemic clouded the picture for every industry.
Prevedere Inc. has raised $25 million to add jobs and speed growth that was already fast – revenue growth is typically 80% to 100% year-over-year, founder and CEO Rich Wagner said.
"Our No. 1 priority is top-line revenue growth," Wagner said. "We think we can help every company forecast better and leverage insights better, so we want to build a company that can grow to those heights."
On an annualized basis, subscription revenue is in the top quartile of software-as-a-service companies, he said, and it added dozens of clients last year in manufacturing, retail and consumer packaged goods.
Norwest Venture Partners, a returning investor based in Silicon Valley, led the January round, with participation from Workday Ventures, M12, JobsOhio, Gaingels and Latitude Ventures. M12, the VC arm of Microsoft Corp., also is a repeat investor.
Outside capital is helping Prevedere hire ahead of demand, Wagner said, otherwise it would be cash-flow positive. It's raised a cumulative $60 million over the decade.
Prevedere, Italian for "to foresee," harnesses internal and external data to build predictive models for business planning. Since 2019 it's added AI capabilities to its suite of software products, called ERIN for "External Real Time Insights."
"It reduces the routine and mundane model building that was done by our customers and our team, and ends up producing more accurate models and more stable models," Wagner said. "It really ends up supercharging the model-building process – but it also outperforms the human in building the models."
The business also has a partnership with the financial planning software of Workday Inc., the software giant whose $250 million VC fund is an investor.
"They're a good go-to-market partner for us," Wagner said. "We think there’s a lot of value in combining our technologies."
Huge economic uncertainty in the pandemic drove demand. External factors like supply chain disruptions, labor market imbalance and inflation are outside a company's control.
"When you have record growth across industries, improving forecasting is not as much a priority as when there is volatility," Wagner said. "It significantly increased awareness of what we do – and increased the difficulty of the traditional methods companies used before to do prediction."
Heightened priority for prediction "is evidenced by Prevedere’s broadening list of global enterprise customers," Promod Haque, Norwest senior managing partner, said in a news release. "The continued enhancements to the ERIN suite of products will help these customers confidently predict and forecast throughout the constantly changing market."
Enhanced and automated forecasting will help clients gain competitive advantage, Mark Peek, managing director of Workday Ventures, said in the release.
Besides headquarters in the Smith Brothers Hardware Co. Building north of downtown, the company has an office in Sunnyvale, California. Wagner splits his time. Most of the nearly 50 employees are in Ohio.
Wagner designed the first version of the software when working at a specialty chemical company, which became his first customer when he left to make it a business. It remains a customer today.
Rev1 Ventures, back when it was TechColumbus, was a pre-seed investor and has consistently supported the business, he said. JobsOhio, which created a VC fund last year to support rounds led by others, provided a convertible note last year and also joined this latest round.
