Did someone say product market fit?!? All eyes on Accel Health as they ??????. Congrats Chathri Ali and team on all the progress!
This is a story about why you back killers. I met Chathri Ali back in 2017 when she was COO of a small, 10-person startup called Recharge. It was back when there was a lot of doubt around whether Shopify apps could generate venture scale outcomes (or as us distinguished VCs like to call it — “TAM issues”). Fast forward, they white-knuckle, bootstrapped the business, later raising at a 2B valuation. Watching her brute force build a category leading company solidified two things for me: 1/ This woman is an assassin, and 2/ I’m never betting against her. When she called me up last March saying she’s starting a company and wanted to run it past me, I said, “I’m in for $250k, what are you building?” Not only was the idea a full departure from e-commerce tech, it was HRtech (??) selling into healthcare (??), focused specifically on physician recruiting (??). I’d be lying if I said I didn’t mentally panic for a second. If venture capital could have an allergic reaction to a pitch, this pre-seed, pre-launch company would send you into full anaphylactic shock ?? Her reasoning was sound though — “We have to be something to someone now, and earn the right to be everything to everyone later.” So we got to work turning this 48-hour old, nameless idea into Accel Health. The Wild Fruit team put together the sexiest deck in less than 5 days, and she kicked off her fundraise to build the modern tech stack for healthcare recruiting. Ludlow Ventures entered the chat, and the round wrapped in 24 hours (Brett deMarrais also backs people > everything). They’re now on a 200%+ MoM growth clip with insane PMF, and I just got this text from her this morning ?????? Moral of the story, back exceptional people with proven track records of building real businesses that make real money, solving real problems, and let them do their thing. LFG ??