Workhorse Capital Invests in Traackr
Dave and I are delighted to share that we’ve made an investment in , the leading provider of influencer relationship management (“IRM”) solutions for brand marketers.
Our investment in Traackr highlights our emerging growth-equity investment focus. By all measures, the company is an already-successful SaaS business. The company serves well over 100 enterprise-class customers, having established itself as the category leader in the influencer relationship management space. Traackr’s results show all of the hallmarks of a successful SaaS business; rapid growth, high gross margins, and negative net-churn. Further, having essentially bootstrapped the business on a small amount of non-institutional equity capital, the management team is battle-tested and has shown itself to be fiscally disciplined.
What Dave and I admire most about Traackr’s leadership is the disciplined manner in which they have gotten the value-creation flywheel turning. Traackr isn’t leading the league in the vanity metrics category (capital raised, FTEs or burn rate). Rather, this workmanlike team is focused on the hard financial and operational indicators of success around demand generation, product innovation, customer satisfaction and cash.
The story of Traackr is unconventional if compared to the path taken by venture-backed businesses. But their story is par for the course for bootstrappers. Two founders, Pierre-Loic Assayag and David Chancogne started Traackr to solve a problem; they wanted to organize the web’s content around people, rather than around pages, keywords and context. Ultimately, they found application for the technology they had built when influencer marketing (a people-driven process) started to become mainstream. But rather than trying to go full-unicorn with Traackr (which probably would have killed the business), PL and David have taken a pragmatic, disciplined approach to establishing Traackr as a category leader. The Traackr team wrote a great post on their . Unconventional, people-driven and wonderful…
Now, having established a market-leadership position, Traackr has the opportunity to accelerate its growth by raising its first institutional round of capital. We’re pleased to have the opportunity to work with Pierre-Loic and the entire Traackr team as the company embarks on the next phase of its value-creation journey.
At a recent all-hands event, Dave and I had the honor to participate by handing out rewards to key members of the team. Many of the team members received well-earned recognition throughout the event. I had the honor of announcing the winner of the MVP award which is given to the team member who most represents the company’s values through their contributions to the company. Although only one employee could receive this particular honor, I was struck by the sense that the award could legitimately have been awarded to any one of the 50 team members who attended.
Congrats to the entire Traackr team for completing your first institutional financing! Dave and I are delighted to be your partners.
