I love operations – from the tiny details that have to be taken care of every second of a company’s life, to the big-picture operational transformations that can make or break a company’s success. 

And I love working with operations teams – from front-line staff, all the way up to operations managers and COOs. 

Operations are what makes the world of business work. It’s the people building, running, and managing operations day in, day out who make all the difference, and they do it with a passion that shines through for all to see. 

It’s truly priceless for me to see operations teams succeed in solving both the small and big problems thrown at them every single day. Being able to help them succeed is what I love most about what we do at Next Matter. 

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Our Journey to Series A – 4 years of Hard Work

When founding Next Matter in 2018, after a few months spent bootstrapping and prototyping, I knew that I wanted to build an automation and orchestration platform for operations, the connective tissue of every company. And I set out to build a company that I’d love to work for - one that would help the operations people I loved working with to succeed.

It’s been 4 years of hard work for us to get from an early prototype and a few early users to where we are now, serving some of the world’s fastest-growing and technologically-advanced financial services, insurance and ecommerce companies. 

Which brings us up to today. 

I’m excited to announce that we have raised a $16m Series A funding round led by OMERS Ventures with participation of our early backers BlueYard Capital, Crane Venture Partners and a number of experienced operators and angels. 

And that’s only the news on the surface. 

Leading up to this round, we’ve built an incredible team of operations and technology enthusiasts who have built our platform and helped customers to succeed in a way we could only dream of when we got started a few years ago.

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The nature of operations – unique, ever-changing, and tough to solve

We went through many ups and downs on our journey so far – not only because startups are hard, but because we chose to dedicate our time and energy to a problem that’s incredibly hard to solve. 

A company’s operations are unique, and they’re changing all the time. That’s the nature of operations in every single company, which makes it very difficult to build a solution that automates and orchestrates operations across companies – let alone across industries. There is no “one-size-fits-all” solution for ops.  

There are indeed dedicated cloud platforms to run every functional business area – Salesforce and Hubspot for Sales, Zendesk and Freshdesk for Support, Jira and Gitlab for IT, etc. – but there is no dedicated platform to run unique, ever-changing operations across functions.

As a result, businesses waste time, money and – quite frankly – a good share of their operations teams lives on duct-tape solutions built with generic tools like spreadsheets, emails, and chat. In developing expensive, custom software that often doesn’t meet expectations (and hiring more and more people to get the job done) they multiply the problem instead of solving it.

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To build a proper solution for operations, we had to start from scratch

To solve this problem, we started by looking at first principles and best practice patterns required to run excellent operations. 

Some of these we got right from the start, but it still took us many attempts to get the actual technical solution to where it needed to be, and we iterated our way through customer feedback for months. Other learnings only came over time, through our hands-on work with customers and the fair share of mistakes we made along the way. 

It took three full years of trial and error working with our pilot customers before we were ready to launch Next Matter early last year. But it was all worthwhile – a point that’s underscored by the fact that we grew our customer base 25% month-on-month leading up to this financing round.

Through all those ups and downs we arrived at the platform that is Next Matter today – a purpose-built cloud platform to automate and orchestrate operations. As we learned from our customers, both automation and orchestration are equally significant components of a high-performing operations solution. 

It is not enough to automate singular steps of a process or interactions between systems; nor is it enough to provide another tool for teams to coordinate and track their work. The combination of both automation and orchestration functionalities is what makes our operations platform truly viable and unique.

We haven’t yet arrived at the final answer to all the problems companies face with running their operations, but we’ve made significant progress towards providing a proper solution. It’s a solution that solves some of the toughest operations challenges our customers face today, and we’re on the right track to solving the rest of them too.

The journey ahead is committed to our customer’s success 

This is only the very beginning of our journey. 

With the new funding we will double-down on expanding the capabilities of our cloud platform in close collaboration with our customers. We will also look to scale our business in Europe and the US, and grow our team across functions, including software engineering, marketing, sales and customer success. 

If you are a Next Matter customer, partner or team member, you know that we take our customer’s success – as well as the selection of people and partners we work with – very seriously. We commit to using this new financing round to enhance our customers’ operational success with Next Matter, and to increase the capacity of our team and partners who help us to deliver on this promise. 

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Thank you for your continued support – and please do reach out! 

Looking back at what we have achieved so far, and at what lies ahead of us, it’s impossible not to get excited about the impact that building a real solution for operations will have on every single user, their teams, and their organizations – not to mention the impact organizations can achieve, in turn, by running excellent operations.

Thank you to everyone who has been part of this journey so far! 

It’s a true honor being able to help our customers achieve their most ambitious goalswith Next Matter. And it’s an honor to build a great company along the way, with a team of exceptional people, partners and investors who are fully committed to the success of our  customers and their operations.

If you want to become part of this journey check out the roles we are currently hiring for. 

If you would like to learn more about Next Matter for you and your team, book a demo with us today. You can also read about our approach to operations transformation and get started yourself with our operations automation playbook. 

And if you want to reach out directly to me, just drop me a message on LinkedIn, Twitter or send an email to jan [dot] hugenroth [at] nextmatter [dot] com.