TIA Ventures Year End Newsletter

2024 >> 2025

Seeking Edge, Creating Value

2024 was an action-packed year of investing, advising, diligence-ing new opportunities, and adding major new muscles to our team.

Adding Growth-Driving Talent

Ram Parimi and Charlie Lambropoulos joined the TIA team formally this year as Venture Partners. Both are ‘all pro’ individuals we’ve worked closely with over the past decade, originally at our Colgate Incubator and then across our portfolio of investments.

They each add critically important operational skills and perspectives, to our investment selection process and to helping our portfolio companies scale faster and more efficiently. Ram is deeply experienced on the Go-To-Market (GTM) side, and Charlie has vast experience building software and driving product development velocity. During the second half of 2024, Charlie and Ram dedicated significant bandwidth to working with 6 of our Fund 3 portfolio companies, helping accelerate GTM and product/engineering efforts.

We cannot stress enough the importance of adding this level of experience and intensity in GTM and Product to our team. Over 10 years of investing in seed-stage companies, it has become crystal clear that these are two critical areas for early-stage companies that can either create enormous friction or be growth accelerants, and they are directly correlated with the speed of success…or the opposite.

For a snapshot of 2024 activity please see the graphics below.

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Looking across all three TIA Ventures Funds, 2024 was a story of:

1. It’s never too late for a smart and well-executed pivot

In Fund 1, ChargeItSpot executed a 180° pivot that has enabled them to quintuple their value, closing multi-million dollar deals with some of the world's largest retailers. In Fund 2, Marpipe pivoted away from multi-variate ad testing to creating a solution they call “Enriched Catalogs”. The new product and business line has taken off and the company is now in the fortunate position of trying to keep up with demand from brands.

Both examples illustrate the value of relentlessly listening for your customers’ unmet needs as this practice can open the door to enormous new opportunities. Both are also great examples of earlier-stage companies leaning into one of their greatest advantages—agility—and not being too rigid in decision-making in the face of adversity simply to honor previously set plans and expectations. It’s worth noting that ChargeItSpot was already in business for ~8 years before launching ARC.

2. There is a high and multi-faceted price to pay for growing too slowly

While not a revelatory observation, we see the result of “too slow growth“ playing out as follows:

A company grows nicely but struggles to “grow into the valuation of their last round”. This is generally a function of founders initially succumbing to the allure of an unrealistically high valuation, and new investors being willing to pay an unrealistically high price to win the deal. The result is that the company ends up in a position of negotiating weakness and has to accept a flat or down round which impacts all existing equity owners. In some of these cases, it also becomes clear this was part of the initial strategy of the newer investors, who anticipated they could adjust their total cost basis at the next round if things didn’t go as well as planned.

To minimize the chance of paying the price for “too slow growth“, we 1) exercise ‘valuation discipline’, avoiding valuations premised on perfectly executed growth plans (which seldom happen) so that the company can sufficiently grow into the valuation, 2) push founders to raise more capital so they have ample resources to get to the next inflection point, and 3) now embed Ram and Charlie as advisors on day one to accelerate scaling in GTM and Product.

3. Huge benefits come from driving down the time to onboard/implement your product

B2B customers are especially sensitive to the pain and risk of tearing out legacy software products to implement better technology, regardless of the benefits that a new platform provides. Whether or not prospective customers directly articulate this, we’ve seen it to be one of the biggest factors in slowing down or killing deals.

Companies that can promise--and deliver on--short and painless implementation will sell more efficiently, grow faster, and turn this into a sales advantage. We have seen this in practice, and top-performing companies focus on driving down ‘implementation time’ as a key performance indicator.

4. The automation of service businesses with AI and interoperable data will lead to a new category of high-growth software company

We are witnessing this potential first-hand through our Fund 3 investment in Cookie Finance, an accounting platform focused on creators. The company is a great case study for us on the future of tech-enabled services: scale revenue exponentially and use AI & workflow automation to eliminate the need to scale labor at the same rate. This is a great example of what an AI-enabled world can look like and where we will be looking for opportunities.

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As 2024 draws to a close, two powerful tectonic shifts will present substantial investment opportunities going forward:

Tectonic shift #1: Millennials and early Gen Z are now in, or moving into, positions of B2B buying power.

This segment of consumers has grown up with the frictionless and almost magical B2C experiences delivered by Amazon, Apple, Airbnb, and others.

Juxtapose this B2C magic with the ubiquitous B2B friction experienced in the workplace, and you’ll discover immense frustration with current business processes and software. This frustration was not equally shared by prior decision-makers, as they were conditioned into thinking “this is simply the best we can do.”

This changing of the guard opens the door to new B2B solutions that can deliver B2C-like magic. These new B2B buyers are increasingly receptive to new software tools but expect more. Companies with the best chance of succeeding with this new cohort of decision-makers will eliminate the most painful and non-productive administrative work, eliminate the requirement to enter the same data multiple times in multiple places, enable effortless product trialing, and deliver significant value quickly.

Tectonic shift #2: Data interoperability that emerging AI technologies both enable and depend on

An immense amount of the dysfunction that characterizes today’s business processes (particularly cross-functional processes) is a result of multiple silos of critical information that cannot interact without time-consuming manual intervention, extraction, analysis, cleaning, and restructuring. This creates extreme friction, added costs, mind-numbing administrative labor, decreased job satisfaction, lack of 24/7 access to critical ‘sources of truth’, missed opportunities in connecting dots and insight, and high frustration all around. This frustration also cascades and metastasizes beyond the business and onto the customers they serve. Just think about scheduling an MRI, getting a resolution on an erroneous charge on your bill, collecting accounts receivable, or predicting inventory, and you’ll understand this concept in real terms.

In light of these two emerging shifts, in 2025 TIA Ventures will focus intensely on:

1) making sure our current portfolio companies are laser-focused on tuning product, GTM strategy, implementation process, customer support and more to take advantage of these shifts; and

2) looking for new investment opportunities that are built from the ground up to take advantage of these shifts.

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None of what we do would be possible without the ongoing support and belief of our Limited Partners, many of who have been with us for a decade. Over the years they have pushed us to be even better at our craft, shared great investment opportunities with us, and have stood by us through black swan events and shifting macroeconomic environments. Please know how appreciative we are.

Hoping for a strong end to the year, and an even stronger start to 2025!

Best,

The TIA Ventures Team