Capacity Series B

About

We expect a lot out of our technology, and for good reason: today’s technology is capable of a lot. Next-day shipping for the birthday gift we nearly forgot, any film title under the sun available for streaming, hailing a ride in a foreign country with the click of a button—our lives as consumers can be pretty convenient.

When we step into the office, however, we step back years, sometimes decades into the past.

Team members are forced to waste costly hours each and every day searching for knowledge that’s spread across dozens of apps, stuck inside thousands of documents, spreadsheets, and web pages, and locked away in the minds of their colleagues. This never-ending search reduces team member capacity, engagement, and overall satisfaction, and is simply unacceptable in today’s workplace.

Capacity connects apps, mines documents, spreadsheets and web pages, and captures the tacit knowledge of an organization—making it all instantly accessible via chat.

We have a rapidly growing customer base across several verticals, particularly financial services, HR, healthcare, and education. Our customers include Newell Brands, USA Mortgage, West Community Credit Union, Total Access Urgent Care, Maryville University, Framecad, and EXL, among others.

Capacity was founded in 2017 David Karandish and Chris Sims, and is part of the Equity.com incubator. We’re proudly headquartered in St. Louis.

A little competition goes a long way. At least, that was David Karandish’s theory when he started to think about fundraising for his new company.

Karandish didn’t feel venture capital was the right fit for his new business, a workplace automation tool called Capacity, formerly known as Jane.ai. So instead, he encouraged Capacity’s employees to bring in anyone and everyone they thought might be interested in backing the company’s Series B with a competition to see who could bring in the most.

It worked. On Wednesday, Capacity announced it raised $13.2 million in its Series B from a total of 70 individual investors.

“We liked the idea of casting the net pretty wide,” Karandish told Business Insider. “We wanted investors that would be with us in the long haul, but a lot of the early-stage investors want a quick flip. In the enterprise space it might take 10 plus years to build the business.”

Karandish told Business Insider that his team had requests from almost 100 venture capital firms, but went with a broader range of angels, CEOs, and other individual investors for the round. The company, which uses artificial intelligence to share workplace knowledge across teams, has now raised a total of $23.2 million since Karandish founded the Missouri-based company in January 2017.

“We looked at what we are building and realized we aren’t building something like accounting software. Not to hate on accounting software, but there just isn’t a big market change happening there,” Karandish said. “When the market is growing this quickly we want folks who are going to be in it for the long haul because of the outside value creation that ends up happening in the later years at scale.”

According to Karandish, employees outside senior leadership brought in almost 40% of the round’s total funding. Many had negative experience at previous startups when outside investors came into the company, so he said he was encouraged by the the interest around his unusual initiative.

“Fundraising was my top priority and same with my CFO,” Karandish said. “That gave the team an opportunity to step up in new roles and responsibilities. I think of a startup as an idea trying to find a product market fit, and once you find that, you are trying to create the systems to replicate and scale along the way.”

Karandish, who previously founded and sold Answers.com for more than $900 million, said he would consider traditional venture capital for later funding rounds, but would go through this process with a similar stage company “in a heartbeat.”

Source: Business Insider and Crunchbase

Raises

Pitch deck review summary

It’s funny. They have very clearly copied how Front did their pitch deck (Front series-B). I’ve thrown in three examples for fun. But have a flick through Front and compare it to this so you get it.

Do not copy other’s decks. You can take inspiration of slides, but everyone’s deck needs to be different. This is a big lesson in what not to do.

The deck is ok, but it’s sparse on information and the information that is provided is a little naive. It’s like a kid chatting business with Bill Gates.

Structured summary review

Words

There’s not enough content on each slide to explain things in a way that makes they seem smart.

Slide length

I bet there are a number of slides missing.

Headers

They occasionally use headers properly, but any time there is one or two words you know you are not doing it right.

Appearance

The design is as good as you need it to be. Don’t be lazy and paste in images though. Format them natively.

Narrative

They attempt to have one but that disappears quickly. The slides aren’t even in the right order.

Structure

Generally slides are structured well, but that’s easy when there’s not much content on them.

Slides

They are missing slides. I don’t understand who their target customers are, what their go to market strategy is etc.

Capacity Pitch Deck