Stage 2 Capital Roundup: July 2023

Welcome to the JULY Stage 2 Capital Roundup ??

We’re here to share updates from our portfolio, go-to-market thought leadership and advice, and news from the Stage 2 Capital community including our 500+ limited partners.

Let’s go!

ICYMI — Portfolio News ???

• We recently participated in Slang’s Series A! Stage 2 Capital Partners Daniel Heck and Liz Christo share more details about why we invested here.?
• Grasshopper Bank will deploy Cable - Automate 2LOD Control Testing 's automated testing across its industry-leading BaaS platform and clients, joining others like Axiom Bank & Quaint Oak Bank. Read more.?
• Gigpro was mentioned by Hospitality Today as a company that’s helping tackle worker shortage! More about their recognition here.?
• Vouch just released a NEW Voice of Customer guide to help marketers kickstart their VoC program. Great to see Stage 2 LPs Jill Rowley and Devin Reed share their advice in the guide!
• Versori introduced Sparkboard, a natural language data integration tool powered by AI. Just tell Sparkboard what you want to connect and automate and it will use generative AI agents to create a task list and get to work with those tasks.
• AeroCloud has been shortlisted in the International Trade category in the North West Business Of The Year Awards 2023 — more here.?

Announcements ??

2023 Catalyst Cohort

We’re thrilled to officially share who’s participating in this year’s Stage 2 Capital Catalyst!

The catalyst is designed to support early-stage, B2B companies and founding teams in building a thoughtful, scalable growth engine. Congrats to Athenic AI , Bloomfilter , Bounti.ai , MLtwist , nodaFi , Persana AI , Quill , Revenue Roll , Savvi AI , StartProto Manufacturing Cloud , Status , Tofu , Under.io , and UpdateAI on their acceptance! More here.?

AI Lab Update

Back in June, we launched the Stage 2 Capital AI Lab to help founders with go-to-market AI companies get their products in front of the top B2B execs in tech.

Here’s a glimpse at a few of the program’s participants:

?? Tofu provides a unified platform for creating hyper-personalized, omnichannel campaigns at scale that converts leads for B2B marketing teams. Tofu leverages brand guidelines and segmentation (personas, industries, accounts, keywords) and uses generative AI to create unlimited variations of on-brand content for ads, emails, social, landing pages, blog posts, case studies, sales enablement, and any other content needs. Tofu was founded by a team of AI/ML engineering leaders from Facebook and Google, as well as B2B marketing leaders from Slack and ConsenSys.

?? rule5 is the AI teammate for strategic go-to-market teams. Value selling is a game changer in sales — especially in a tough economy — and rule5 empowers every member of the GTM team to show up with value, relevance, and confidence. Their ever-growing list of use cases includes generative value messaging, business-relevant outreach, automated ICP and buyer research, discovery call script generation, and even outreach sequence design, all grounded in value and differentiation.

?? 11x offers an end-to-end, AI Powered SDR called Alice. Alice automates the entire job of an SDR, from start to finish. Customers (all VC backed B2B SaaS companies) have been getting 2-3 meetings a week, on autopilot, for a 10x less cost than an SDR. Alice gets smarter over time, can operate in multiple languages, and can produce the same volume of output as a full sales development team.?

Now hiring

Our portfolio companies are hiring! Discover the open opportunities across our network here.

New Go-to-Market Resources ??

Our team and community of 500+ go-to-market LPs is always working to provide founders with resources, tools, and articles to help scale their businesses. Here’s the latest and greatest:

Demand Generation

• Stage 2 Capital Co-Founder Mark Roberge and G2 CRO Mike Weir dive into how to align sales and marketing in a new Science of Scaling podcast

Go-to-Market Playbooks

• Partner Mandy Cole shares how to sell to the right customer by identifying your ICP

Go-to-Market Hiring

• A recent How 2 w/ Stage 2 video shares how founders should go about making the first sales hire

Go-to-Market Leadership & Management

• Stage 2 Capital LP Leela Srinivasan shares a brilliant idea for a SPIFFs that will boost morale and motivate teams

Revenue Operations

• Stage 2's Liz Christo and RevPartners ' Brendan Tolleson explain how to conduct a forecasting meeting that actually gets results?

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