MadKudu, the Product-Led-Growth (PLG) leader disrupting the software industry, announced today its $18M Series A led by Felicis with participation from BGV, Alven, Techstars, and notable angels in the PLG space like Elena Verna, former CMO at Miro, SVP Growth SurveyMonkey, Malwarebytes, Amplitude and Darius Contractor, CPO at Vendr. This raise will bring MadKudu’s total funding to $27M to date. As pioneers in the PLG space, MadKudu is the largest platform with nearly 100 customers like Miro, Dropbox, Cloudera, Amplitude, Plaid, Unity, or Mapbox.

MadKudu was founded by Sam Levan and Francis Brero, who met at AgilOne in Mountain View, CA while building the first Customer Data Platform product in the market. During that time, Sam realized that product-led growth requires data science. For example, it is needed to help sales reps sift through thousands of product users to identify who is ready to buy. Akin to looking for a needle in a haystack. Building a first MVP, Sam was able to show that growth teams could double their free-to-paid conversion rate within just a few weeks.

But most revenue teams fail to deliver results with data science projects. Data scientists build black-box solutions that cannot be understood or tuned by anyone without a Ph.D. This makes it impossible for sales reps to trust or use them. Sam and Francis started MadKudu to give revenue organizations data science superpowers to discover revenue opportunities, in real-time, without engineers, and with full control.

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“As we were evaluating all kinds of solutions to help us better monetize our product-led motion, we were blown away by the innovative and differentiated approach of MadKudu,” said Nick Rico, SVP of Growth at Lucid. “It’s a transformative technology, the kind of secret weapons that the best growth leaders keep to themselves.”

MadKudu will use its latest round to triple the size of the team in 2023 and solidify its lead in the PLG ecosystem. This means doubling down on their investment in product and engineering to increase the breadth of users that the product serves, and further improve the core user experience. Additionally, the company will spend a significant amount to work with the best PLG experts in the world to launch a series of programs to grow the new generation of revenue leaders.

“We’ve been incredibly impressed by the stories from MadKudu’s customers and how much this solution has changed the life of go-to-market professionals,” said Niki Pezeshki, General Partner at Felicis. “MadKudu has a radically novel approach to helping B2B companies grow faster and more efficiently. And their numbers show that it works. They’re in a unique position to become a category leader in the PLG and RevTech space.”

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With product-led growth on the agenda of every board meeting in the software industry, tech veterans compare the disruption of the “product-led” model to the transition from on-premise to cloud.

According to Mark Roberge, former CRO of HubSpot who spoke at SaaStr Annual 2022, PLG has the same disruptive potential that SaaS had in the past 20 years.

This is because the way companies buy software has dramatically changed. Customers want to try a product before they talk to a sales team and make a purchase. The market has noticed this change. For example, Figma, a poster child of the product-led growth movement, was recently acquired by Adobe at a 50x multiple of revenue, making itself an outlier in the current environment. This is in part because the product-led growth model offers much better unit economics than a traditional sales-led model.

“We see a future where thousands of growth and marketing teams find it easy to be successful running a product-led-growth model alongside their traditional funnels,” said Sam Levan, Co-Founder of MadKudu. “For this to happen, we need to rethink the stack and reinvent how we use data in sales and marketing.”