As Instabase continues to grow from a seed-stage startup to a well-funded scale-up, it validates Greylock’s early conviction in both the market opportunity and the founder’s vision. This investment underscores the potential for intelligent automation to reshape enterprise operations in the coming decade, positioning Instabase at the forefront of this transformative wave in business technology.
Greylock Partners invests in entrepreneurs that focus on consumer and enterprise software companies.
- Menlo Park, California, United States
- 101-250
- Venture Capital
- Early Stage Venture, Late Stage Venture, Private Equity, Seed, Venture
- www.greylock.com
About Instabase
Instabase is a platform for businesses to build customizable apps for automating different parts of their business.
- San Francisco, California, United States
- 251-500
- Series C
- Private
- instabase.com
Our Investment in Instabase
In a 1990 documentary for the Library of Congress, Steve Jobs said, “What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.
” Jobs was referencing a Scientific American study that compared locomotion efficiency for various species and how humans alone were far behind other animals like the most efficient condor but coupled with a tool like the bicycle, humans “blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts.”
Jobs’ insight that the personal computer could make the human brain more productive kicked off two decades of the PC revolution.
His insight in 2007 with the iPhone that smart phones coupled with ubiquitous internet access would kick off the mobile revolution enabled a generation of consumers to conjure, food, cars, photos, and games at the touch or swipe of a screen.
However amidst all this individual productivity (or lack of productivity, depending on which app you are using!) we have largely neglected many of the business processes that run our largest companies.
If the PC was a bicycle for the mind, then this new age of big data, machine learning, and cloud computing will build a bicycle for intelligent automation in the enterprise.
In the summer of 2015, Greylock and NEA led the seed round of Instabase after Pete Sonsini from NEA introduced me to the company, and later, Greylock proudly invested in the company’s Series A and B rounds.
I still remember my first meeting with Anant Bhardwaj, Instabase’s founder and CEO. Anant biked to the Greylock offices in Menlo Park from the Caltrain station and walked into our meeting equipped with his laptop and bike helmet.
For the next hour he shared both his personal story and his inspiration for Instabase, based on his work on DataHub out of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Unfortunately for Anant, his bicycle was stolen shortly after our meeting but fortunately for Greylock, I was able to invest in him and his vision for Instabase.
The vision for Instabase is to make computers work for people.
Just like the personal computer worked for individual persons, Instabase’s mission is to empower people to focus on the meaningful, productive parts of their jobs.
Instabase provides a platform to solve operational challenges on any tech stack, leveraging novel data management approaches and machine learning tools designed for enterprise scale.
The powerful toolkit is comprised of drives, databases, and apps, which allows creators, developers, and organizations to build complex workflows based on their needs.
Instabase gives innovators a completely new set of building blocks, which they can use to address existing processes, imagine new ones, and solve problems on a larger scale.
Transforming Enterprise Business Processes
This intelligent automation of business processes will change how companies get work done.
Instead of just automating tasks with a robotic process, Instabase eliminates these tasks entirely with a set of intelligent applications all integrated together on a single platform.
Customers are able to transform previously expensive, time consuming, and error prone workflows.
For example, the global bank, Standard Chartered is transforming their client experiences with Instabase.
Specifically, Standard Chartered is automating its client on-boarding process, credit documentation, and Know Your Client (KYC) processes.
This has resulted in both a better customer experience but also saving the bank money through worker productivity.
They have reduced the time to onboard a new Corporate and Institutional client from 41 days to 8 days.
In their retail banking practice for small and medium enterprises, Standard Charter is saving over 300 hours a week in manual labor by not just automating a process but by replacing it with an application built with Instabase.
Empowering People through Innovative Solutions
Anant and the early Instabase team including David Lluncor and Ashish Dahiya were incubated in our San Francisco office.
Greylock’s core talent and CXO teams helped the company with their first technical hires and customer introductions including an early customer that was a Greylock portfolio company.
For seed investments, we look for a great market and a great founder. With Instabase we found both.
Four years later, Instabase has stayed amazingly close to the original vision to transform how companies accomplish general purpose and sophisticated tasks with a non-intimidating tool set and Instabase has grown from a seed funded startup into well funded scale-up, with some of the largest companies around the world using its product every day.
From Seed Investment to Scale-Up Success
The past thirty years have changed how we think about personal productivity and personal entertainment.
With smartphones, smart homes, and internet connected devices daily tasks can be achieved quickly and easily. The next ten years will see intelligent automation and companies like Instabase remove the friction from transforming enterprise business processes.
Conclusion
As Instabase continues to grow from a seed-stage startup to a well-funded scale-up, it validates Greylock’s early conviction in both the market opportunity and the founder’s vision. This investment underscores the potential for intelligent automation to reshape enterprise operations in the coming decade, positioning Instabase at the forefront of this transformative wave in business technology.
You can read the rest of “Why we invested in” collection here:
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