Knownwell Inc., a Manassas startup with a suite of software tools designed for professional services firms, has raised $4 million to help triple its revenue and workforce over the next 18 months.
The close of the seed round brings Knownwell's total investor-led capital to $6 million since its founding in September 2023 by CEO David DeWolf, a serial entrepreneur known for launching Fairfax-based engineering software firm 3Pillar Global Inc. nearly two decades ago.
Sovereign's Capital, an Atlanta investment firm that backs companies in the U.S. and Southeast Asia, led the seed round. New York investment firm Studio VC and several unnamed private investors also participated.
DeWolf told me a paid, beta-level version of his company's product is currently in use by six mid-sized professional services firms operating in marketing and technology. He declined to share specific revenue figures, but estimated the new outside investment will help the company maintain operations until it begins looking to raise a Series A round between $10 million to $20 million within the next two years. The latest funding will also help the company's marketing efforts and ramp up hiring.
DeWolf said he launched the company knowing the professional services world is built on relationships between firms and their clients. Until now, DeWolf said, there hasn't been a way to collect and interpret data that could define where these relationships stand across a firm's customer base.
By using off-the-shelf artificial intelligence-powered products, Knownwell's tech scans emails, call transcripts and chat logs to help understand customer relationships, yielding insights into the strengths of these relationships in real time and ideas on where improvements can be made.
"We are building what we call a commercial intelligence platform," DeWolf told me. "There is a relationship that exists between a service provider and their customer, and we provide deep intelligence into the health of that relationship, and specifically what the service provider needs to do in order to strengthen that economic relationship so that it sustains and grows over time."
DeWolf said Knownwell is "simply drinking from the fire hose" of the communications occurring within a professional services firm. Its entry point into a company often starts with analyzing email conversations, but the insights it gleans can be improved by using more conversation-based data.
Knownwell, which counts 15 employees now, plans to hire and retain about a third of its future workforce in Greater Washington, DeWolf said, with the rest split between its Nashville, Tennessee, office and remote roles. In April, Knownwell added Phillip Merrick to its board, another Greater Washington serial tech entrepreneur who is now leading pgEdge, an Alexandria startup that helps data-heavy websites and applications run faster and more efficiently.
