Inrix co-founder and CEO Bryan Mistele celebrated his company’s most recent funding with a Dr. Pepper at a bar housed in the Inrix office.
Known as Dave’s Place, the bar is the creation of Dave Hoadley, who works in operations for the Kirkland-based traffic management company. It features a blue arrow sign that reads “Dave’s,” a metal side table designed to look like a barrel, strings of lights, and beer and wine on tap.
Mistele, who doesn’t drink alcohol, kicked his feet up on the couch with Inrix Chief Financial Officer Thadd Stricker. A group of employees joined the impromptu hang, which occurred one afternoon in the spring of 2023 after Inrix closed its $70 million funding round from Morgan Stanley. Inrix announced the round last August.
“Any given day after four o’clock, there’s four or five people in that room just hanging out, chatting and blowing off steam,” Mistele said.
Inrix began working with Morgan Stanley well before the investment talks started. The data and analytics company had been looking into an initial public offering and using Morgan Stanley as its investment bank. About two weeks before it was going to file its IPO paperwork, the process fell through due to the market downturn. Inrix in March of last year then pivoted to working with Morgan Stanley’s growth investment arm.
Mistele and Stricker worked with Morgan Stanley’s Nick Nocito, who is based in New York City. Mistele said he has never met Nocito in person. He added that the investment process moved faster than normal because Morgan Stanley had already done due diligence on Inrix for the potential IPO. The whole process only took a matter of weeks.
For Inrix, the deal all came down to price and terms.
“There weren’t really any bells or whistles in terms of the overall financing,” Mistele said.
Inrix, founded in 2005, generates traffic and parking data for clients. Companies can take the data and make decisions on new store locations, while cities can use it for urban planning and limiting traffic congestion. Inrix also helps transportation agencies with highway and intersection planning, while car companies can help drivers find cheap parking and stay alert to unsafe driving conditions. Its clients include BMW, Subway and Microsoft.
Mistele says the company has roughly 350 employees, including about 100 in Kirkland and 150 in the U.K. The rest of its staff are remote.
Mistele and Stricker did most of the work closing the round at Inrix’s Kirkland headquarters. Their offices are about 20 feet apart, so the pair found themselves often running back and forth between them. Mistele is an avid boater and has multiple pictures of boats in his office as well as a model wooden sailboat. He also has a model seaplane, a de Havilland Beaver, the same plane that Kenmore Air flies out of Lake Union.
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Mistele said this funding was the easiest raise he has done, mostly because Morgan Stanley already had all the information it needed. Inrix signed all the documents electronically through DocuSign, a notable change from funding rounds in the past.
“When we first started Inrix, we all had to go to the lawyer’s office and sit there for three hours signing paperwork,” Mistele said. “Now everything happens electronically. They send over the paperwork. You click ‘yes’ on DocuSign about 15 times, sign everything and then it’s done. It’s kind of anti-climactic.”
The new funding was an important milestone for Inrix, but it didn’t give Mistele a reason to relax. According to Mistele, he was quickly concerned with how the company would grow and deliver for the company’s new investor.
In November, Inrix acquired Portland-based Ride Report, which helps governments monitor shared transportation devices like scooters and bikes. The companies didn’t disclose financial terms of the deal. Ride Report had 75 customers at the time of the deal. Mistele said adding Ride Report’s data from these different transportation options will improve Inrix’s products.
In August, Mistele told the Business Journal Inrix was still planning for an exit event by 2025. The company still wants to go that route, Mistele said, and plans for something to materialize over the next 12 to 18 months. What form that exit event takes, however, remains to be determined.
“I think we’re fairly flexible at this point. We have investors that have been in for quite a while,” Mistele said. “Our investors want liquidity. Whether we do that through a private equity transaction, whether we do that through a sale of the company or a public transaction, I think we’re pretty flexible. It kind of depends on the market.”
