We’re pretty bad at sharing why we do things. That changes now. And starting *right* now I’m going to start a series of ‘Why we invested’ posts.

Obviously we want to showcase our founders and their startups but what’s also important, I think, is that we share what a great match looks like to us, so other founders can start to pattern match and find the investors they want to work with. We may be a great fit for you, we may not be. 

I hope this series helps in your investigation. Let me know what’s missing.

Back to Garvis.

Garvis, is a bionic demand forecasting business designed to help organisations better manage their production and distribution. Imagine you’re Unilever or Coca Cola – how much product should you make and ship, to where and when? Too much and you waste cash and resource, too little and you’re leaving money on the table.

In August we led the £3m seed round to help Garvis further develop their bionic Ai platform and radically transform enterprise supply chain management.

I met Piet the CEO through a deal scout back in April ’22. It was immediate intrigue as we love supply chain startups, especially in the light of Russia-Ukraine flip-flopping global supply chains. Our thesis has always been focused on this space but right now it’s just super important.

So we dug into what the startup really does, who they are, who they serve and how they’re different compared to some serious incumbents such as SAP.

When looking at new startups you need a thesis with yardstick. A ‘what you do’, with a ‘how you know’ list. Yes we invest in B2B but there are layers deeper than that, and everyone here has their own particular lens or viewpoint. 

Here is my own personal startup ICP. My cheat sheet:

• Founders – Tech and domain smart who’ve lived with the problem.

• Opportunity – It’s potentially a global offering, with potential local clients who really care.

• Transformative – It leans into a trend and truly transforms how we make, move, or manage business.

• Territory – It’s a UK business, or from a smaller market & want to use the UK as a global springboard.

• Working Product – It works and has some form of real world client validation. (Usually some revenue)

• Trojan – What they sell today is not how they’ll make money in 5 years’ time.

• It’s different – There’s magic, and well funded competitors are not dominating this wave.

• Relationship – It will be a healthy marriage and we can add value to the mix.

How did Garvis measure up?

It was an initial hit across all the lines at first glance. The only question I had was around Trojan’ing – should that be important in this context. I’ll come back to that. 

• Founders – The team, driven by Piet are in the top tier of experts who are brilliantly suited to solve this problem. They collected organically via various projects over several years, invested their own cash, built product 1 and took it to market. So deep domain experience is baked in, with genuine buy-in. 

• Opportunity – It’s obvious that supply chain challenges are a global issue but is this product the solution and can this team drive global growth? Yes is the short answer. There was nothing restrictive, they’re a distributed global team across London, Pakistan, the US and Belgium – and they already had clients in 6 countries. Tick.

• Transformative – will this change the world. Absolutely. In spades. Their key differentiators being two fold:

1 – The solution is open or white-box – Competitors are closed, i.e. the software is not available for clients to interrogate. The Garvis solution is the opposite where clients can see how decisions are being made in real time.

2 – Time to value is measured in hours not months. Where competitors are closed books they also take months to install and configure. The sales process for Garvis is simply ‘try it and see’. The proof is in the data so they compare with their existing solution. Analysing historic data, clients can quickly see that Garvis, out of the box, is more accurate, faster and totally transparent. Regularly hitting 5% improvements with a target of 10%. In real money this means 2-5% added to the bottom line. Which is truly transformative for any organisation that makes large numbers of ‘things’ and ships.

• Territory – Starting as a Belgian startup we flipped the top-co to UK to take advantage of available capital, brand connections, legal strictures and other leverage that the UK has to offer. Next stop USA as part of global domination.

• Working Product – With 30 happy clients the proof was pudding shaped. Doesn’t matter what we think – only them. We spoke to them, plus a selection of potential customers to test the draw. The open-box decision making was a true differentiator in clients’ eyes. The ability to give operational teams real-time open insights was obviously a game changer.

• Trojan – This was an unknown and in context, irrelevant. Normally I would look for a play where what you’re doing today truly unlocks tomorrow, from a product level. Garvis were already in this camp with differentiation already so strong that this could be parked. One for a future board meeting should the need arise. 

• Differentiation – See above. They have the jump. Clients are jumping. Sales are already rocketing.

• Relationship – Piet could have worked with many other investors with multiple term sheets on the table. He chose us, Bosch the German engineering and tech group, and Scalebridge. All for different and important reasons – Jamie from Scalebridge a seasoned fund raising maven and trustee, us as kindred founders supporting the GTM, and Bosch for network, credibility and access. As an investor group we agreed how we should best work together which took numerous meetings to define clear lines of responsibility, value-adds and access. There was a healthy marriage to be had. 

To date Garvis is working with 50 multinational organisations, the team is rapidly expanding, and they’re closing 5 new deals per months. 

We’re super proud to be on the Garvis rocket ship.

<insert semi-obnoxious VC’esque rocket ship emojis>

Dan