Aware plans to double its staff this year as its software becomes embedded in the daily online interactions of a growing portion of the nation’s workforce.
Revenue tripled last year over 2020, and some huge customer wins at year’s end promise even greater growth for 2022, co-founder and CEO Jeff Schumann told Columbus Business First.
Demand soared in the pandemic for the five-year-old Columbus startup’s cybersecurity and sentiment analysis software for collaboration platforms like Slack and Facebook Workplace. As offices reopen, employers believe those tools will remain.
The company has grown to 115 employees since the Growth Equity arm of Goldman Sachs invested $60 million last fall and added two partners to Aware’s board. Based in the Brewery District, the company is on pace to grow to 200 to 250 distributed jobs by 2023, mainly in Central Ohio.
We caught up with Schumann after Aware won the inaugural Columbus Inno Madness online competition, a just-for-fun bracket challenge featuring some of the region’s most noteworthy tech companies.
Employees got into the spirit of each week’s matchup, Schumann said.
“We all know everybody else at every other startup in town, … so it ends up being more of a game and at most bragging rights, but it's exciting,” he said. “I think every one of those startups is a champion in that bracket.”
The following are highlights from our conversation, edited and condensed:
What are you learning through your technology about the nation’s overall sentiment on return-to-office and hybrid workplaces? We don't have direct access to our customer data – that's a data privacy thing – so everything we share is anecdotal. One of the things we have heard from some of our bigger customers is: Before where they thought everybody was going to be widely remote forever, the pendulum is swinging back. The employee sentiment somewhat is, I miss being face-to-face with people regularly. Culture is not infectious over zoom and our digital chat technologies.
What are some recent customer wins? We landed two of the largest fast-food restaurants on the entire planet in Q4, (and) we landed a couple of the largest retailers on the planet. We're talking organizations with over 1 (million) to 2 million employees each. Some of the biggest and best brands are coming onto the platform, and pretty fast. They're rolling out collaboration software over a journey of 12 to 18 months. Every time they add groups of 10,000 employees, we recoup those costs. (Electric vehicle maker) Rivian's an example. They were hiring 800 employees per week and adding them all on to Slack.
You started in cybersecurity and expanded to sentiment analysis. Has the software evolved in other ways? One of the exciting things – that we never planned before – could be an incredibly material thing for Aware long-term: We've been in conversations with a number of (online multiplayer) gaming publishers. It's two times the size of the movie industry, and the largest problem the gaming industry suffers from is toxicity – everything from people saying really, really treacherous things, to child predators. This is just something incredibly outside of what we were doing before, but it is complementary in taking the toxicity analysis and sentiment analysis and all that stuff that we've done really well in corporate enterprise. We've had (stock) trading platforms approach us too.
You did not reach out first; this opportunity came to you – just as Goldman Sachs did last fall. How has that round and adding two directors contributed to the maturation of the company? I still pinch myself. I feel incredibly proud and honored and lucky to have been able to welcome both Goldman Sachs to Aware, but also to the state of Ohio, as we’re the first investment they've made in the state. We have a talent pool that we can gain access to that we probably wouldn't have been able to access before. (In sales,) the brand of Goldman Sachs alone helps us tap into some of the top executives and leaders at companies across the United States.
(In operations,) they bring a level of knowledge and experience that gets us building a sound and solid and efficient business for servicing enterprise. And this is critical for me. You can go out there and raise great venture capital rounds at overly inflated valuations. And in the end, when you try to go public, it just hurts shareholders, because you weren't building a great business along the way. It forces us at a really early stage to build the level of muscle memory to do this effectively, so when ultimately Aware does go public, we'll be a great business.
Describe Aware five years from now. In less than five years, we'll either IPO or exit via strategic acquisition. It's got to be the right fit, and it's got to make perfect sense.
We are really bullish on what we're doing. Splunk (Inc. [NASDAQ: SPLK]) built a $25 billion company on addressing the challenges and opportunities with managing the massive stream of machine-generated big data. You can change one word, and you'll get Aware: Addressing the challenges and opportunities of managing the massive stream of human-generated big data. And we think that's a much larger opportunity – if you do it right.
