5 on Funding with Sam Levan, Co-founder and CEO of MadKudu

Welcome to 5 on Funding! This weekly newsletter asks venture-backed startups 5 detailed ways they plan to use the new funding to scale their companies.

Quick Facts About MadKudu:

Company Description: For B2B SaaS companies that need to increase quality pipeline, MadKudu is the only predictive scoring solution that analyzes your marketing, product, and sales data to surface the prospects in your database who are most likely to buy — allowing your GTM team to focus their time and energy where it matters most.?

MadKudu is built to help B2B revenue teams prioritize the 20% of prospects that generate 80% of revenue. The platform uses data science to model your ideal customer based on past performance, allowing GTM teams to increase conversions at every step of the buyer journey. Companies like Lucid, Miro, and RingCentral use MadKudu to double qualified pipeline, increase ROI from campaigns, and reduce wasted effort.

Industry: Marketing SaaS

Amount Raised: $18m Series A

What 5 things will you do with this funding?

Key Priority for Funding: Invest in talent and customers (and maybe book Nicolas Cage)?

1. Experiment with AI Copilot

“Our mission is to align sales and marketing around customer value and providing the best experience. We sit on a massive amount of data from our customers and from external data sources. And so far, I think the way that sales and marketing have been engaged is mostly with workflows with little UIs. We’ve been experimenting and testing AI Copilot for sales and marketing and seeing a lot of success there. These tools are best used to help sales and marketing know what to do and when, and leverage data that they have in a way that's very easy for everybody involved.”

2. Increase partnerships

“We’re seeing a lot of consolidation in the market. People are trying to make their tech stack work better for them. People buy a lot of different tools, but they don't play well together. And so we're very convinced that having strong partnerships help both our customers and ultimately everyone in the stack. We are investing in commercial partnerships with companies like HubSpot, Marketo, Salesforce, and other data providers. We’re also investing in integrations.?

To do this, we’re hiring a head of partnerships, investing in R&D to build these integrations, and sponsoring events.”

3. People and talent?

“We've been growing the team significantly, and we will continue to do that. It’s very, very important to have the best culture where everybody can be the best version of themselves. We want to be a top 1% company. So people-wise, it also means you need to have a team that's one out of 100.?

To do this, we are hiring a Head of People, and we have a budget for employee coaching and training. We’re investing significantly in our ‘Kudus.’”?

4. Customer education

“We see an opportunity for taking all the best practices that exist among our customers and sharing them with others. We work with known brands like AutoDesk and MongoDB —?some very smart marketers and go-to-market teams —?and our customers always ask us how others like them are doing. We’ve been sharing those best practices organically now, but we are hiring new customer enablement team members to collect different marketing playbooks from our customers, create benchmarks around what works and doesn’t, and share that information back with our customer community.”

5. Customer events

“We’ve been investing in customer events, and one of my co-founder's dreams is to have Nicolas Cage join one of those events as a speaker. So I don't know if we're gonna do it with the $18m that we have right now, but maybe it’s the Series B when I surprise him. See if I can negotiate a good deal.”

About the co-founder: Sam Levan is the co-founder and CEO at MadKudu. After more than 10 years of experience using data and AI to solve all kinds of problems, Sam started MadKudu with the dream of making it very simple for sales and marketing teams to use data and AI to identify the leads most likely to buy, whether they are in an inbound, ABM, or product-led funnel. MadKudu is now the leading predictive analytics solution for product-led companies. Sam is also a passionate member of the startup community and has been a mentor with Techstars since 2018 and a board member at Gated since 2021. When not on a Zoom call, Sam likes to spend time with his 4 kids plus one dog, or show creative ways to fall while on a surfboard.