Mitch Stutler and Rob Walsh grew up just down the street from one another in Northern Kentucky.
They attended the same grade school, the same high school — and while they went to different universities and found different jobs in their respective fields — a shared entrepreneurial drive brought them back together.
"During college and shortly after it, we would always bounce ideas off of each other," Stutler said. "We sort of had this handshake agreement that we would do something together when the time was right for it."
So when Stutler approached Walsh with the idea that would become VividCharts, there was no hesitation. The Lexington-based startup, founded in 2018, developed a data visualization platform that helps customers of California-based ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) to generate and distribute real-time reports, and recently won the inaugural KY Inno Madness competition.
After graduating from University of Kentucky with a degree in finance, Stutler went to work for consulting firms where he was introduced to ServiceNow, a software company offering a cloud-based platform that helps companies manage digital workflows for enterprise operations.
"It's a great platform. They've got all this data living in it, but they really didn't have what they needed to take advantage of that data," Stutler said. "I didn't really know much more than that. I just knew it was something I saw people struggling with constantly."
Walsh, who had worked for a venture-backed software-as-a-service startup in Silicon Valley, was on board with Stutler's plan to solve those issues for ServiceNow customers.
The duo quit their jobs and jumped into building the platform in January 2018. They quickly created a "bare-bones" minimal viable product and secured the company's first paying customers in the spring of that year, Stutler said.
That momentum only accelerated in 2019 after VividCharts competed and won ServiceNow's CreatorCon Challenge, a "Shark Tank"-style competition that had more than 70 companies vying to get their ideas in the ServiceNow store. The win came with an investment from ServiceNow's venture arm, but Stutler said the validation from the company VividChart's platform is based off of was an even bigger deal to them.
Despite being cautious during the pandemic, VividCharts continued to scale rapidly in 2020 and 2021.
"We took a conservative approach to 2020 and so we ended up doubling our business and that's where, at the end of that year, we had our eyes like 'OK, we were basically as conservative as possible in 2020 and there was still a big enough need that we were able to double the business, so it's probably a good time to try and actually raise funds,'" Stutler said.
Last year, VividCharts raised a $2 million seed round, led by Airwing Ventures with participation from Poplar Ventures and Unbridled Ventures, to meet the demand from Fortune 1000 companies. Some of its customers include Nestlé, Discover, Intuit, Raymond James and Southwest Airlines.
Stutler declined to disclose revenue.
That capital allowed VividCharts to grow its team, which has increased from just five employees at the start of 2021 to 24 employees today, 16 of which are based in Kentucky.
While fundraising isn't a current focus for VividCharts, Stutler said he does anticipate the need for Series A round down the road as it eyes future growth opportunities.
"We work in the ServiceNow space, but it's really a persistent problem across all these cloud platforms. Like if somebody buys a license for Salesforce, they're not doing it because they're able to visualize their data and deliver it an engaging way. They're doing it because they need a CRM [customer relationship management]," he said. "We know at some point, we likely will expand other platforms, but the way we're looking at it right now, there are 7,500 ServiceNow customers and we're not even working with 1% of them yet."
