Just last night I was trading emails with an amazing founder who is chasing an audacious goal. I am a huge fan of his and would love to work with him again. But I was trying to articulate why it was that Lobby Capital couldn’t get our arms around an investment. In describing what we were looking for in a Series A investment, I shared the following extraordinarily imprecise formula:
(a) dream team meets
(b) powerful vision
driving
(c) meaningful progress
achievable
(d) with dollars invested in this round
It is imprecise because the following are obviously deeply subjective: What is a dream team? What is a powerful vision? What is meaningful progress? What counts as achievable? Having said that, here is why we invested in Faros AI:
Dream Team
Check. To my mind, a “dream team” is made up of profoundly committed and passionate experts who are solving a problem they’ve personally encountered and have the background and experience that makes them the perfect folks to solve the problem. In this case, the founders of Faros have worked together before building a powerful AI platform for Salesforce. How good were they at Salesforce? That question is answered pretty easily by presence of one of my co-investors in this round — Salesforce Ventures. Vitaly Gordon, Shubha Nabar, and Matthew Tovbin all worked together building Salesforce’s AI platform, Einstein. Salesforce was sad to see them go. But they were happy to bet on their next great platform — Faros AI.
Powerful Vision
Vitaly, Shubha, Matthew and the rest of the Faros AI team have a long history building software. And while they were thoughtful managers who were able to create great software products, they became acutely aware of how little genuine visibility they had into the software engineering process writ large. Finance teams have granular data on things like expense, cash flow, etc. They have dashboards and metrics with broad and deep visibility. Sys Ops teams and Dev Ops teams have tools and platforms and dashboards that similarly provide meaningful visibility into the efficacy, security, velocity of their work. But what Vitaly and team determined was that companies lacked meaningful tools to measure, instrument, and manage scaled engineering teams. So they created Faros AI to do just that — create the definitive platform for Software Engineering Intelligence. Bring their AI expertise to data extraction, data integrity, data visibility … in short, AI meets the broadest possible set of engineering data to create massive opportunity for organizations to scale and optimize engineering teams. Powerful Vision. Check.
Meaningful Progress
Can Faros AI make meaningful progress here? For certain. Vitaly and team have created a platform that has already been adopted by some amazing software engineering teams — Salesforce (of course), Box, Coursera… And the results speak for themselves. Each of the leaders on these teams (engineering leaders, program leaders, people leaders) is spending dozens of minutes a day on the Faros AI platform getting visibility into how to make the most of their engineering resources. With the $20M that Faros AI has raised in this Series A, they will be able to expand the footprint of their product, their integrations (already 70+ platforms strong), their user base, their channel, all of which will have a powerfully self-reinforcing impact. By the time Faros AI raises its Series B, I’m quite sure that many (if not all) of the best managed engineering teams in the country will be garnering important intelligence from the Faros AI platform. Meaningful progress indeed. Check.
Dollars Invested
With $20 Million in funding, Faros AI is well positioned to take advantage of this moment. They will continue to hire amazing AI talent (unlike many of the companies I’m seeing today — Faros has not retrofit itself to pretend it is an AI company, these were the folks who created Salesforce’s AI platform before it was cool). They will continue to expand the footprint of the Faros AI platform, including implementing an unmatched number of integrations. And they will build out their go to market muscle to match their already well-established technical leadership. Lots to be done. Plenty of capital to do it. Check. Check.
I could not be more excited about joining forces with Vitaly, Shubha, Matthew, and the entire Faros AI team. And I could not be more excited about the impact that Faros AI will have on the software world.