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Bevy raises $40M Series C with 20% coming from Black investors
You might expect that a startup that makes community building software would be thriving during a pandemic when it’s so difficult for us to be together. And Bevy, a company whose product powers community sites like Salesforce Trailblazers and Google Developers announced it has raised a $40 million Series C this morning, at least partly due to the growth related to that dynamic.
The round was led by Accel with participation from Upfront Ventures, Qualtrics co-founder Ryan Smith and LinkedIn, but what makes this investment remarkable is that it included 25 Black investors representing 20% of the investment.
One of those investors, James Lowery, who is a management consultant and entrepreneur, and was the first Black employee hired at McKinsey in 1968, sees the opportunity for this approach to be a model to attract investment from other under-represented groups.
“I know for a fact because of my friendship and my network that there are a lot of people, if they had the opportunity to invest in opportunities like this, they will do it, and they have the money to do it. And I think we can be the model for the nation,” Lowery said.
Unfortunately, there has been a dearth of Black VC investment in startups like Bevy. In fact, only around 3% of venture capitalists are Black and 81% of VC firms don’t have a single Black investor.
Kobie Fuller, who is general partner at investor Upfront Ventures, a Bevy board member and runs his own community called Valence, says that investments like this can lead to a flywheel effect that can lead to increasing Black investment in startups.
“So for me, it’s about how do we get more Black investors on cap tables of companies early in their lifecycle before they go public, where wealth can be created. How do we get key members of executive teams being Black executives who have the ability to create wealth through options and equity. And how do we also make sure that we have proper representation on the boards of these companies, so that we can make sure that the CEOs and the C suite is held accountable towards the diversity goals,” Fuller said.
He sees a software platform like Bevy that facilitates community as a logical starting point for this approach, and the company needs to look like the broader communities it serves. “Making sure that our workforce is appropriately represented from a perspective of having appropriate level of Black employees to the board to the actual investors is just good business sense,” he said.
But the diversity angle doesn’t stop with the investor group. Bevy CEO and co-founder Derek Anderson says that last May when George Floyd was killed, his firm didn’t have a single person of color among the company’s 27 employees and not a single Black investor in his cap table. He wanted to change that, and he found that in diversifying, it not only was the right thing to do from a human perspective, it was also from a business one.
“We realized that if we really started including people from the Black and brown communities inside of Bevy that the collective bar of a talent was going to go up. We were going to look from a broader pool of candidates, and what we found as we’ve done this is that as the culture has started to change, the customer satisfaction is going up, our profits and our revenues — the trajectory is going up — and I see this thing is completely correlated,” Anderson said.
Last summer the company set a two year goal to get to 20% of employees being Black. While the number of employees is small, Bevy went from zero to 5% in June, and 10% by September. Today it is just under 15% and expects to hit the 20% goal by summer, a year ahead of the goal it set last year.
Bevy grew out of a community called Startup Grind that Anderson started several years ago. Unable to find software to run and manage the community, he decided to build it himself. In 2017, he spun that product into a separate company that became Bevy, and he has raised $60 million, according to the company.
In addition to Salesforce and Google, other large enterprises are using Bevy to power their communities and events, including Adobe, Atlassian, Twilio, Slack and Zendesk.
Today, the startup is valued at $325 million, which is 4x the amount it was valued at when it raised its $15 million Series B in May 2019. It expects to reach $30 million in ARR by the end of this year.
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Bevy acquires community-focused networking company CMX
Bevy announced today that it has acquired CMX, which it describes as “the world’s largest community for community professionals.”
In other words, CMX is trying to connect and support the people whose job is to build communities around their companies. To do that, it organizes the CMX Summit and also offers membership to a private network called CMX Pro.
Bevy, meanwhile, has built software for companies to manage community events. In fact, the company was created by the organizers of Startup Grind, who said they initially built Bevy because of the challenge involved in managing all the different Startup Grind events.
The company now says it works with customers including Slack, Atlassian, Asana, Gainsight and Duolingo — in fact, Duolingo uses it to host 1,000 monthly events.
In an email, Bevy CEO Derek Andersen told me, “I’ve been a CMX community speaker, sponsor, and member for many years, and there is no better way to get educated and networked in the community industry than CMX.”
The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. CMX’s co-founder and CEO David Spinks will continue to lead CMX initiatives within Bevy, and he will become the company’s vice president of community.
“People are in desperate need of meaningful community,” Spinks said in the acquisition announcement. “They’re craving more depth, and that often comes through in-person, real world connection. Derek and the Bevy team have built a great platform to help teams scale their IRL community programs. We’re thrilled to join forces and work toward a more meaningfully connected world.”
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Startup Grind founders raise $6.4M for community event platform Bevy
The founders of entrepreneurial community Startup Grind have a startup of their own — Bevy, which announced today that it has raised $6.4 million in Series A funding.
The funding comes from Upfront Ventures, author Steve Blank, Qualtrics founders Ryan Smith and Jared Smith, and Pluralsight CEO Aaron Skonnard.
CEO Derek Andersen (who founded and runs both Bevy and Startup Grind with CTO Joel Fernandes) said that the product was created to deal with Startup Grind’s challenges as the team tried to organize events using a mix of Eventbrite, Meetup and MailChimp,
“It worked fine at first, but a few years later, we looked up and we had hundreds of cities, and we had maybe 500 people that were working on it, and it was too much,” Andersen said. “For the first time in many years, we started to get smaller instead of bigger. We were spending all of this time just running triage and maintenance on the platform.”
So in early 2016, the team built its own event management software, with what Andersen said was “no intention of anyone else using it.” But eventually, he realized that other companies were facing similar problems, so he launched Bevy as a separate startup to further develop and commercialize the product.
“We really focus on the smaller, community events,” Andersen added. “If you just do a conference, Eventbrite is great — I’ve hosted thousands of events on Eventbrite. But if you want to host five or 10 events a month or jack that number up anywhere above that, and you don’t want to hire 10 people, then that’s really what we’re perfect to do.”
Usually, these are events where community members play a big role, or are even doing most of the organizing themselves. So beyond supporting tasks like creating event listings, sending out promotional emails and managing sponsorships, Andersen said one of Bevy’s big differentiators is the ability to precisely control which users are authorized to perform different roles at different events.
In addition, Andersen said that with Bevy, companies can create fully branded experiences and get full access to the customer data around their events. Customers include Atlassian, Duolingo, Docker, Evernote and Asana.
Andersen also suggested that the company is taking advantage of a broader shift in marketing, where companies are relying more on their own customers and communities.
“All the best companies do it today,” he said. He predicted that in the future, “Every company will have a customer-to-customer marketing strategy. Now we’ve made it affordable and turnkey.”
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Backed By $4 Million, Bevy Debuts A Photo And Video Storage Solution The Whole Family Can Share
Families today often have more photo-taking devices than family members, which has led to the problem of people having massive numbers of photos and videos, none of which are properly organized and shared. A Boston-based startup called Lineage Labs, launching today and backed by $4 million in seed funding, is working on a solution. It’s introducing a product called “Bevy,”… Read More
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