Thought waves on seed venture

Today, we are thrilled to congratulate TheLoops co-founders Somya Kapoor and Ravi Bulusu, and their entire team on a remarkable milestone: their acquisition by IFS, a global leader in enterprise software. This landmark achievement is not just a testament to the team's incredible vision and execution, but also a powerful validation of a shared belief in the transformative power of AI to revolutionise customer experience operations.

For us at Tidal Ventures, this is a moment of immense pride. We are honoured to have been a partner to TheLoops since their 2020 Seed round, and this outcome is a brilliant success for the founders, the team, and our investors.

Investment principle: Backing founders with domain expertise

When we first met Somya and Ravi, we saw an accomplished, product-led duo with deep domain expertise. Somya's experience leading product management at ServiceNow, combined with Ravi's background in AI at Splunk and as a multi-time founder, immediately stood out. They had identified a critical and growing pain point: customer support operations were overwhelmed, and existing tools weren't fit for purpose.

As we wrote in our original investment notes, our conviction was rooted in bringing the principles of observability to the front office. For too long, customer success and support had been a black box. We saw a powerful opportunity: what if you could make these operations observable, turning a traditional cost centre into a company's primary growth driver? TheLoops was the answer. Their platform was designed to bring the context, collaboration, and intelligence needed for true observability, empowering teams that had been left behind by modern data tools. We knew this approach would deliver a true step change in the customer experience, and that founders Somya and Ravi were the killer combination with the deep domain expertise to make it happen.

A shared vision realised

TheLoops has executed on this mission with passion and precision, evolving into a leader in AI Agents for the next era of Customer Success. Their platform doesn't just assist agents—it amplifies their expertise. By delivering intelligent routing , proactive insights, and knowledge that evolves with every interaction. Imagine knowing what happened in a customer product interaction when a ticket is opened without them having to explain it! TheLoops has empowered businesses to resolve complex cases faster and more consistently and in turn scale customer operations.

This journey culminates in today’s acquisition by IFS. The strategic fit is undeniable. As a customer of TheLoops, IFS experienced the power of their AI-driven platform firsthand. IFS shares TheLoops' vision for the future of Autonomous AI Agents and provides the global scale and resources to accelerate this mission.

Validating the AI-driven strategy

This successful exit demonstrates the power of Tidal’s investment strategy. Software and AI startups can create immense value and generate strong, early returns with differentiated, AI-driven products that attract significant buyer interest. TheLoops built a platform with compelling intellectual property that delivers tangible ROI, proving that a company with a distinct technology advantage can achieve a great outcome.

This is a formula we believe in, and it is just the beginning. We are proud to see our Seed II portfolio company's successes and are actively replicating this strategy in our Seed III fund, backing companies with cutting-edge AI, real technology advantages, and rapid global potential.

We want to extend our deepest gratitude to Somya, Ravi, and the whole team at TheLoops. Thank you for your relentless hard work and for including us on this incredible journey. We are delighted to have partnered with you and will be cheering you on in your next chapter with IFS.

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A new software era is here. It doesn’t just store your data, it does the work for you.

For decades, enterprise software was built around Systems of Record: authoritative databases where structured information lived. Think ERPs, CRMs, or EHRs. These systems were valuable because they democratised access to critical information. For startups, they were hard to displace. They became the default axis of influence in every organisation: inflexible, centralised, and (mostly) passive.

We believe AI is breaking that model.

We’re entering the age of the System of Work: software that doesn’t just manage data, it does the work. These AI-native systems generate the actual deliverables: the compliance document, the diagnosis summary, the customer reply, and the inspection report. They collapse the distance between insight and action.

This isn’t a UX upgrade. It’s a paradigm shift in how work happens.

What is a System of Work?

A System of Work will autonomously perform productive tasks. It’s not a place you go to see what needs doing, it’s the system that actually does it. That might look like:

• An AI agent that resolves a customer ticket end-to-end
• A generated legal contract tailored to a specific jurisdiction
• A clinical platform that drafts summaries and actions from messy encounter notes

Where legacy tools required human intervention to interpret and act, Systems of Work incorporate agentic behaviour: they act on their own, within guardrails. They represent a new kind of software stack: data, model, workflow and output, all in one loop.

These systems are defined by a few key traits.

• Agentic behaviour: They initiate actions rather than waiting for human prompts.
• Embedded actions: They do not just suggest what to do. They complete the task directly within the system.
• Workflow ownership: They become the go-to place where work is created, reviewed, and shipped.
• Outcome-based value: They are priced and evaluated based on the results they deliver, not just on features or access.

Why the record → work shift matters

In a world of Systems of Work, the traditional axis of influence in software is beginning to lose relevance. The classic “source of truth” may still exist somewhere in the stack. However, the source of productivity, the system where outcomes are created, will shift.

Once a system starts producing core business outputs, it becomes exponentially more valuable and much harder to displace. This creates a new kind of competitive advantage. Systems of Work do not only benefit from access to data. They generate new, proprietary data through use. They encode human expertise, automate repeatable decisions, and improve over time. These effects compound, and become self-reinforcing advantages that deepen with every interaction.

This shift also changes the economics of software adoption.

• From insight to execution: No more offline handoffs. Work gets done where the data lives and the value is immediate and obvious.
• From user-as-operator to user-as-editor: Humans go from clicking buttons and entering data to reviewing AI-generated output.
• From seat-based pricing to outcome-based monetisation: Business models shift toward per-task or per-output models, unlocking new budget lines tied to productivity.
• From “jobs to be done” to “roles to be done”: AI systems take over full professional roles, not just isolated tasks enabling full workflow ownership.
• From software tools to workflow axis of influence: These systems become the gravitational centre of daily operations. Frontline teams feel the value directly, not just IT buyers.

How Vertical AI is powering this shift

This transition is most visible in Vertical AI: AI products built specifically for the needs of one industry. These aren’t generic LLM wrappers. They embed into frontline workflows and solve the hard, boring, expensive problems unique to sectors like healthcare, logistics, construction, and financial services.

The most advanced Vertical AI systems:

• Combine deep domain knowledge with powerful models
• Build proprietary data moats by capturing interaction-specific context
• Deliver real-world value through actionable outputs, not just dashboards

And crucially, they don’t just make software smarter, they replace entire layers of human effort.

Industries will not just adopt AI. Industries will be restructured by AI

Systems of Work will drive the biggest changes in industries where work is still manual, complex, or repetitive.

Winning without replacing

Smart AI startups are using over-the-top (OTT) strategies to enter these workflows. Rather than attempting to displace existing systems of record, they adopt a wedge strategy to layer in value → starting with simple value-additive propositions like:

• A co-pilot layered on top of an EHR system
• A transcription layer that starts automating follow-up actions
• A reporting tool that gradually becomes the system of work for compliance

Once embedded, these tools don’t just assist, they absorb the workflow. Once the workflow is absorbed, the product has direct access to the tacit knowledge that the human uses to complete a task end-to-end. Access to this ‘grey’ data area helps feed and improve an autonomous neural network, which becomes an expert on the specific task required.

Final thought

The System of Record defined the last era of enterprise software. The System of Work will define the next. We don’t know what that means for Systems of Record, maybe some of them will be able to participate in the System of Work revolution as well. We are focused on finding the founders who are willing to tackle the ‘work’ problem from scratch. The pathways to achieving a System of Work are complex and multi-layered. The optimal way to build toward a System of Work will vary by use case, user archetype, and industry.

Join us from the leading edge of Vertical AI startups, as we publish our live thinking on building Systems of Work.

Orkestra is revolutionising the energy industry with its game-changing platform that enables critical decision-making throughout the lifecycle of renewable energy projects.

The Tidal team is excited to share our investment notes from our second investment in Orkestra to give you a glimpse into our decision-making process. At Tidal, our investments across various markets, models, and products are guided by our core foundational principles that help us define a great Tidal Seed Investment.

Markets with tailwinds

The global transition towards cleaner, more efficient energy sources is no longer a mere aspiration; it’s an imperative driven by environmental factors, regulatory pressures, and evolving consumer preferences. By 2030, this burgeoning sector is poised to become a colossal +$2 trillion global market. As we stand at the cusp of a transformative shift away from fossil fuels, we look to navigate the intricate landscape of clean energy and uncover promising opportunities within renewable technologies, energy storage, and the broader sustainable ecosystem. At Tidal, we look for markets ripe for disruption, and it’s clear that the market Orkestra exists within fits that mould. A few of the factors we’ve taken into account when assessing this opportunity include:

• Bloomberg declared that the energy sector must collectively deploy five times more wind power, three times more solar energy, and a staggering twenty-six times more batteries annually until 2030 to meet basic clean energy targets.
• There is a critical need for enhanced controls in generating and distributing clean power to the grid.
• The future of the power grid is set to be substantially more decentralised in contrast to the conventional centralised fossil fuel-based grid.
• Batteries will emerge as an indispensable component, seamlessly integrated into every renewable energy deployment.
• Virtual or Distributed Power Plants (VPP or DPP) aggregate and scale distributed power generation to normalise supply based on demand to the grid. There is a significant opportunity for a data player to emerge in orchestrating VPP’s power distribution to the grid by improving yield and, in turn, potential margins.

The magnitude of this opportunity is immense, and the race to meet these ambitious climate targets will largely depend on innovation from industry disruptors like Orkestra that empower the industry with much-needed tools that help drive quick and accurate decisions about renewable energy projects at scale.

Products that change the game

Orkestra’s B2B feasibility platform is helping drive the transition to clean energy by providing modern energy companies with the tools they need to analyse, sell, and manage their energy solutions and projects.

Historically, Excel was the go-to tool for analysing the feasibility of clean energy projects, demanding extensive hours from skilled analysts. However, as the urgency of achieving the net-zero targets intensifies, there’s a need to arm sales teams with easy-to-use and accurate tools to quicken the time to a decision. Orkestra’s software is pivotal in the renewable energy transition, enabling teams to set up and evaluate 250 solutions in just ten minutes, compared to the days it would have taken with Excel and expert analysts.

The platform seamlessly integrates its user-friendly interface with sophisticated algorithms and analytics to significantly reduce the time and expense associated with assessing project viability while also enhancing project outcomes from both economic and sustainability standpoints. Orkestra Co-Founder, Chris Cooper, summarised their strategic vision:

We aim to be the intelligence layer that underpins clean energy projects worldwide. Teams that previously used Excel spreadsheets or outdated software instantly see the value in Orkestra’s offering.

Founders that hustle

Co-founders Chris, James, and Michael have deep domain experience, having met at a new energy consultancy, where they worked together on innovative solutions for leading energy and property companies. The team has used their industry expertise and mathematics and data science background to develop sophisticated modelling capabilities for the Orkestra platform. They are deeply data-driven, and their passion to help drive the world towards its climate targets is second to none.

They have built a powerful and capable team that has proved that they can build world-class technology that is loved by its customers and is delivering real-world impact by unlocking clean energy solutions for businesses all around the world.

A compelling business model

The Orkestra team has created a mission-critical product and currently offers subscription plans across three tiers that appeal to a broad spectrum of customers, from small-scale businesses to some of Australia’s largest energy retailers.

Driven by a strong commitment to unlocking the potential of the renewable energy sector, Orkestra is dedicated to enhancing its capability for precise site feasibility modelling. This enhancement will play a pivotal role in facilitating the implementation of a greater number of renewable projects.

Customers have successfully modelled numerous projects and conducted over a million solution simulations through their innovative platform, solidifying their status as the industry benchmark for energy feasibility assessment. With an ambitious goal of sustaining its remarkable growth rate exceeding 200% since the start of this year, Orkestra is poised for substantial expansion.

As time progresses, Orkestra envisions numerous opportunities for further growth by introducing new products that assist energy companies in assessing, tracking, and managing energy assets throughout their entire lifecycle.

Global appeal

Orkestra’s solution addresses a universal problem, which is why they’ve set their sights on further international expansion beyond Australia, New Zealand, and Japan and are eyeing Europe’s thriving renewable energy markets.

By achieving critical mass in their various markets, they can secure a significant data advantage, tapping into a broad spectrum of primary data sources. This wealth of information, combined with Orkestra’s top-tier AI capabilities for modelling, benchmarking, and offering optimisation insights, positions them for excellence in overseeing existing and newly established sites within a multi-site portfolio or virtual power plant (VPP).

The Seed phase and beyond

In its Seed Phase, Orkestra has assembled a highly capable team, demonstrated strong product-market fit, and built a global-ready product. The funding from this round will support their global expansion, enable them to build exciting new product features, and implement a scalable and repeatable go-to-market approach. We see a significant opportunity to ramp up growth efforts with all product and sales activities working in harmony and provide customers with different maturity levels with the opportunity to either self-serve or tailor their offerings with a higher degree of support.

If you’re a visionary founder ready to make waves, please reach out via our website.

Loopit’s mobility platform drives car subscription management and billing solutions for automakers, dealerships, fleet leasing, rental companies and startups.

The Tidal team recently made an investment into Loopit, and we're publishing our investment notes below. We invest across a range of markets, models and products. There are core principles that we live and die by in our investment decisions. For more information on the pillars that make a great Tidal Seed Investment, see how we invest here.

Markets with Tailwinds

With the transformation to cloud, consumers and businesses alike are consuming software online using subscription as the standard arrangement. This transformation is occurring across many other industries, and the automative industry is undergoing its own digital transformation that is set to change the way:

• consumers or businesses interact with car brands (e.g. Care by Volvo)
• consumers obtain the vehicle (e.g. subscribe to an EV through your energy provider)
• consumers experience the entire lifecycle of acquiring, running, managing, and selling a vehicle (e.g. subscribe to a car, maintained by the vendor, only fill fuel, return it when done or swap they vehicle if the plan allows it)

We believe that there is a compelling case emerging for the growth of car subscriptions as a viable alternative to long term rental, leasing, and ownership in many cases.

This transition is aligned with changing consumer behaviour that seeks greater flexibility and convenience around mobility. There is waning interest in owning physical products, particularly among younger generations; hybrid and remote work is changing the way cars are used, and climate consciousness and improving infrastructure are driving a shift to electric vehicles. In addition to being highly flexible, vehicle subscription programs are also perceived as being more cost-effective than traditional car leases, rentals, or outright purchases. The experience of buying and selling a car can be tedious, and, factoring in on-road costs, registration, taxes, servicing, and depreciation, the total cost of ownership is often under-estimated by more than 50%.

In parallel, the auto industry is undergoing its own transformation. Tesla has led the way, disrupting the industry through both its car and its go-to-market approach. Newer micro-mobility categories (e.g. e-bikes, scooters) were born online and have been early adopters of a subscription model, and now the traditional car industry more broadly is transitioning to online retail, which will emphases personalisation and better customer communication.

We expect the subscription market to continue to grow at pace through improvements in price competitiveness, the customer experience, and consumer awareness. According to market research, the current vehicle subscription market is US$4.1B and will grow at 22.8% CAGR to 2030 to a market size of +$31.7B. Over the next eight years, BCG estimates that up to 15% of new car sales will be via a subscription.

Products that change the game

Loopit provides a turnkey subscription management solution that helps automakers, car dealerships, fleet rental companies and startups to introduce car subscription offerings to their own customers.

Loopit’s SaaS platform facilitates the end-to-end subscription process, providing mobility companies with the ability to control, configure, and provide a subscription offering quickly and easily. The platform handles the customer-facing touchpoints such as onboarding, billing, and ongoing customer management, as well as back-office management features such as management of inventory, pricing, and utilisation.

This is game changing for both new entrants who wish to get to market quickly, and existing automotive players who largely run their businesses on legacy platforms that are tailored to other customer models.

Loopit not only powers the shift to subscriptions, they improve the overall customer experience, back office management and economics through software.

Founders that Hustle

Co-founders (and brothers) Michael and Paul Higgins have lived their customers’ problems and built the industry-leading solution to solve it. They initially built Loopit’s software to support their car subscription marketplace HelloCars, before realising the opportunity to provide it more broadly across the mobility industry.

Michael, Paul, and the broader management team combine both strong functional capabilities in building a software business with extensive domain knowledge in the automotive industry. They have demonstrated strong execution, building a healthy and scalable business that has won several key automotive brands as clients and expanded globally prior to any venture backing.

A compelling business model

Loopit have built out an attractive business model and demonstrated strong unit economics. They earn both a subscription fee for ongoing use of the platform, as well as consumption revenues through a clip applied to the underlying subscription payment of the end consumers.

Over time, we see the opportunity for continued growth through expansion into new markets, and further influencing the economics and experience of car subscriptions through the product. With critical mass they can obtain an unfair data advantage with access to inventory, pricing intelligence and a future opportunity to launch their own aggregation play via a marketplace.

The Seed Phase and beyond

Loopit is in its Seed Phase. It has demonstrated strong product-market fit and built out a highly capable team, having bootstrapped the business to date. This round is intended to support with global expansion and implementing a more scalable and repeatable go-to-market approach. We see significant opportunity to ramp up growth efforts with product and sales / marketing activities in harmony, providing customers with different maturity levels with the opportunity to either self-serve, or to localise and tailor their offering with a higher degree of support.

We look forward to continuing to support the Loopit team as they enable the transition to car subscription models.

If you're a visionary founder who is ready to make waves, please reach out via our website.

Somya Kapoor and Ravi Bulusu are co-founders of Loops. Both veteran product people and serial entrepreneurs, they saw the challenges faced by customer service and support agents struggling to work through mountains of tickets with little context, and they decided to fix it.

TheLoops is all about collecting data from software interactions, including logs, alerts and errors, to make customer support mechanisms smarter and faster. Insights can then be fed into product development cycles to enhance the customer experience.

It’s not the first time Somya and Ravi have been founders, but it’s the first time they’ve done it together and they make an unstoppable team. We interviewed them about their journey, and if you're a startup greenthumb, they have some excellent advice.

Finding investors can be a gruesome grind

Finding and pitching to VC funders is a “gruesome process” and a “necessary grind” according to Somya. But there’s an upside. It helps you refine your story and more strongly formulate your vision, which is critical to finding the right VC fit. Because not all VCs are the same and many will not be right for you.

Her advice is take as many interviews and meetings as you can to learn about what you need and weed out the VCs who are unsuitable. “It's not about getting the money, it's about finding a partner in your journey of where you want to get to.”

Ravi says he’s seen startups with the wrong VC match and “it's not just the founders that get really messed up in the process, it’s employees too.” You need to have someone aligned to your long-term perspective, is how he puts it, the way Tidal is for TheLoops.

“It's not about getting the money, it's about finding a partner in your journey of where you want to get to.”

- Somya Kapoor, Loops

How Tidal got looped in

Tidal came along as TheLoops were looking to raise their second round of funding, which coincided with the beginning of the global COVID outbreak in March 2020. Despite the circumstances, TheLoops had plenty of VC investors knocking on the door. But it was through conversations with investment expert Andrea Kowalski and product leader Wendell Keunemann at Tidal that prompted TheLoops to sign a deal.  

“They were super helpful in getting us to think from a founder's angle on why we need the money.” says Somya, “They wanted us to look at it from a place where it would help us grow the company and be beneficial for the customers.” Where other investors look primarily for the potential return, Tidal was looking to how (not just if) TheLoops could succeed. “When you’re building products that customers like, a lot of VCs want to get involved. But Wendell and Andrea were really different.” They offered an insider perspective.

Win the crowd to win investors

The best way to prove a point is to not have to make it yourself. But how do you do that? Somya says you should talk to your customers (lots and lots of them) and get them on side, and Ravi says get your team in a room and “whiteboard the #$&* out of it!” By which he means build a great product based on what customers say. When you do both, you end up with mountains of evidence for why VCs should throw money at you.

“Nothing speaks louder [to a VC] than customers validating your product,” says Somya, even louder than “knowing your cap tables”. Ravi advises to look for synchronicity with VCs, to make sure they understand what you do, the market, the ecosystem. To succeed, “you’ll need their network, so be sure they have a good one and the right one for you.” Tidal fills this role, acting as “advisors and mentors, helping us think through the pros and cons of decisions.”

It’s all about perspective with Tidal, says Ravi, and being “product futuristic”. They bring “the right approach and a really different product perspective. Not just about how to build features, but also how to go to market and put them in front of customers.”

The best relationships come with hard truths

The reason Somya and Ravi make an amazing team is their complementary perspectives. Not just complementary skills (Somya is more go to market and Ravi is more product builder), but the way they see things and make decisions from different experiences.

When asked what Tidal brought to the table, they talked about compatibility at first, admiring the product-led growth mindset and understanding of the B2B tech market. What emerged as most important, though, was that Tidal “understood” them and felt trustworthy, showing an openness and friendliness beyond what Somya and Ravi expected. “We thought it was because they’re Australian,” Somya says with a laugh.

Ravi welcomes Tidal’s product perspective and advice, because “they love products” and are a “founder-led VC firm who live their values.”

Somya advises less experienced founders to seek this kind of trust, but also seek the truth. You want to be able to get bad news and constructive criticism too. “You don’t want to think of your founders as bosses,” she says, you need to be able to approach them with problems “without fear it will have a negative impact.”

Her parting advice is this: “Don't wait to build a perfect slide deck or perfect product. Just get out there and start raising.

The Loops platform stitches data from diverse tools to help reps identify customer issues with contextual insights and recommend resolutions or actions.

The Tidal team recently made an investment into TheLoops, and we're publishing our investment notes below. We invest across a range of markets, models and products. There are core principles that we live and die by in our investment decisions. For more information on the pillars that make a great Tidal Seed Investment, see how we invest here.

Markets with tailwinds

For many companies the load on customer support has increased significantly due to a number of factors including a wider push to self-serve, reduction of bricks & mortar presence, number of contact channels (phone, email, chat, social etc), and more recently due to pandemic induced work from home conditions.

This acceleration of digital transformation strategies has led to increased volumes that overwhelm customer support operations. The current resolution methods lack the tools to give adequate signals to agents to understand the customer issue thus burning precious time to get to a resolution.

The Future of CX

Traditionally, support representatives have not been empowered to own the resolution process. But having an intelligent customer support strategy that bring context, collaboration and workflows by harnessing data across a range of systems reaps huge benefits such as increased sales conversions, decreased service costs, and improved customer satisfaction.

Companies recognise that leveraging automation and analytics is the best approach to reducing handle time thus securing the life-time value of their customers.

Products that change the game

TheLoops brings observability capabilities to front office teams and can truly provide a step change in the customer support experience by accelerating a collaborative path to ticket resolution. The product aspires to be:

A data and analytics learning engine with point-and-click integrations providing insights and collaborative process flows to improve the support team’s efficacy.

Support operations span multiple levels and often sit across support and product teams. However information silos exist where front office teams have not had the same instrumentation as product or engineering teams. This often results in increased handle-time, unnecessary escalations and decrease in agent efficiency.

Our thesis: by empowering front office teams with similar observability capabilities as back office teams, TheLoops will unlock material improvements in CX by transitioning companies from thinking about customer touch points as a cost centres to growth drivers.

It's very clear that the co-founders of TheLoops understood the importance of storytelling through demos as they provided a complete end to end portrayal of how they will positively impact the customer experience with their intelligent support platform.

Founders that hustle

Somya Kapoor and Ravi Bulusu are accomplished operators spanning product and engineering. They truly embody a product-led dynamic founder duo. Their experience spans decades of senior leadership experience in high growth companies giving them deep domain expertise in the customer service and support space. Somya was a VP of Product at ServiceNow and SAP and makes a capable CEO with product chops. Ravi met Somya at a previous startup, forging a strong working collaboration which led to genesis of TheLoops. Ravi was also Chief Architect at Splunk and had multiple startup roles building state-of-the art ML platforms. Their shared learnings through all of these past roles led them to the realisation that bringing product context to support teams will have significant benefits. Together they make a killer combination and they are the right team to solve the problem.

A compelling business model

TheLoops straightforward subscription business model aligns well with the participants that benefit from the improved interactions their platform offers:

• Team plans help agents or reps have contextual insights right inside the support tools they current use today rather than having to switch. This includes Zendesk for Service, Salesforce Service Cloud, Atlassian Jira or Intercom.
• No-code or low-code connectors to key tools in the product stack such as Splunk, Amplitude, Pager Duty, Pendo, Kibana, CloudWatch and much more, pulls in all the data to stitch and synthesise the insights.
• Workflows help make escalations simple by seamlessly bridging systems and providing the same context to all parties so everyone is on the same page. This applies to helpdesks like ZenDesk, issue trackers like Jira or group chat like Slack, it's about keeping the context in the systems that these teams work in.

Intelligent customer support is just the initial offering for TheLoops. There will be more exciting news on the horizon as they progress their platform roadmap.

The seed phase

TheLoops sits firmly within the Seed phase - and the team is currently rolling out their platform to several well known customers, hiring an awesome US-based team, and developing many patterns from the machine learning engine that will benefit all their customers in turn serving their users better than before.

We are delighted to be partner with Somya and Ravi to bring a step change to customer support interactions for the better. Stay tuned for updates on their website (they're hiring), Twitter, and LinkedIn.

A note on the observability thematic

Observability stems from engineering and control theory; it is a measure of how well internal states of system can be inferred from knowledge of its external outputs. In a highly distributed cloud architecture your ability to predict failures is limited. Therefore the solution is observability (vs monitoring) which attempts to pull together Metrics, Events, Logs, and Traces to provide granular insights and to answer why a system may have failed.

These systems are now best practices and part of a typical SaaS stack. They assist the "back office" like engineering and product teams to determine the root cause of an issue. But what about the countless issues that originate from the customer facing side? The lack of tooling for the "front office" like customer success or support creates a major bottlenecks in reporting, triaging, and resolving customer reported issues in a timely manner.

Customer Service tools (e.g. CRMs, CDPs, CXPs, Service Desks etc) are not equipped to provide this context, and observability tools are not built for front office teams. However, front and back office teams can each use observability principles to gain a shared understanding of the customer context to streamline the workflow of customer issues, and in turn, vastly improve the customer experience.

The Loops is building this new and exciting platform for the future of CX. If you're a visionary founder who is ready to make waves, please reach out via our website.

If amazing and life changing ideas are the heart of every startup, then technical know-how and persistence must be the brains. This is particularly true for Hamish Ogilvy and David Howden, the two brilliant science and mathematical minds behind AI search engine Search.io (formerly Sajari).

Frustrated by poor search capability on websites and hearing that frustration echoed among colleagues, Hamish and David decided to fix it by building a more intelligent search engine, and they have succeeded. Not only that, they have found a powerful niche in e-commerce that enables the conversion of search queries into transactions.

The DIY roots

As a startup, their story is not unusual. They did most things themselves as they gained some momentum: built a website, developed beta prototypes, learned to code, looked for customers, paid the payroll, insurance and themselves (sometimes).

Their early learning curves were steep: What do we charge? How do we make that recurring? How do we scale? What are the best use cases for our idea? Who do we target?

And the biggest question of all: How do we get to the next step?

Tidal becomes Search.io's first VC investor

Having had angel investors to help with some early hires, Search.io started looking to the next horizon. “Tidal was really the first decent size investment that actually allowed us to think about scale.” according to Hamish. “Angel funding doesn’t quite provide enough for the next proof point, but Tidal has been really good at working with us on this.”

He goes on to say how this was “more of a factor for us than money and valuation”, as they were seeking “alignment in terms of where we saw the business going and the product-led attitude of Tidal was the right fit.”

Location was not an issue with Hamish in San Francisco and David in Australia, matching with Tidal’s product expert Wendell in Sydney and investment leader Andrea in New York. “Having someone who understands Australia and the world is handy because Australian and US markets work differently.”

Hamish adds, “when you find people that you click with and you have common opinions on what's important, then decisions become easier.”

Putting the pieces together to scale

Deeply technical products like Search.io take time and are complex to build, then once you get there technically, there’s still the business part to think about. “Scale is very much about process,” says Hamish. Starting a business is “like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces on the floor and you’re trying to find bits that fit so you can start moving in the right direction. But scaling a business is more about putting structures of repeatability in place.” This is where Tidal offered expertise, they helped with the scaling strategy, providing advice on structure and   “understanding some of the gaps that we needed to fill.”

Having reliable sales models was one of those gaps. Scaling isn’t just about spending money to get more inbound sales, Hamish points out, “you have to work out where you can spend it to get repeatable impact to the business. And that brings in a different way of thinking that's not necessarily where we had been. We needed help to build out the structures to make that actually work.”

Scaling a business is not something that you’re born knowing, says Hamish “the more advice and assistance that you get from people who know parallel businesses, the better. I can ping or talk to the Tidal team anytime and that has been really helpful.”

Hiring isn’t just bums on seats

Working with Tidal, they had to determine the best way to recruit and then “hand off efficiently while keeping the vision and the quality in terms of what you want to do.” It requires thought and planning to get “people in a position to get up to speed and execute on things.”

Through meetings and conversations, Search.io and Tidal developed a hiring plan that included the identification of key positions, numbers and mixes of roles, that would set them on a path to “transition from being resource-efficient to growth efficient.” The plan eventually went to the board with Tidal support.

There’s a power of numbers in hiring, as Hamish explains, “you don't hire one person in sales. You hire two. Even if you only need one, you hire two.” This avoids a single point of failure where if one person does not work out, you've lost a hundred percent capacity. Building teams in cross-functional sales pods was exactly the kind of shift in thinking that Tidal steered Search.io through.

“Future hiring is a key part of the ongoing planning and thought process.” Producing more and selling more can only be supported with carefully managed recruitment, not just more people.

In hindsight, Hamish says they “we’re probably a little bit conservative, which slowed us down.” But in their defence, it is difficult to know how aggressively to hire at the beginning of a pandemic.

Sales isn’t just selling more

Like in hiring, it’s not a matter of more, it’s a matter of being repeatable. Tidal was there to advise on how to restructure billing for scale. “Overcoming those challenges were really important growth factors for our business, and Tidal gave us great advice on that.”

His heavy but true parting advice for new founders is to remember that “you're building a revenue machine. At the end of the day, that's the only thing that allows you to grow and do what you want to do. So put that into your strategy and priorities from day one, being able to understand all the numbers. And if you don't find that interesting, or don’t want to do it, then don't start a business.”

Carted is building an API that can power universal commerce experiences anywhere on the internet, allowing developers and creators to build a checkout anywhere.

The Tidal team recently made an investment into Carted, and we're publishing our investment notes below. We invest across a range of markets, models and products, there are core principles that we live and die by in our investment decisions. For more information on the pillars that make a great Tidal Seed Investment, see our investment criteria here.

Markets with tailwinds

E-commerce is an enormous market - USD$10 trillion - and is forecast to grow at ~15% p.a. to 2027 (Grandview Research). Covid-19 further accelerated what was already a clear trend towards online commerce, driving years' worth of e-commerce adoption in months. Tidal have had conviction around the e-commerce thematic for some time, and have made investments in a number of pioneering companies in the space, including Shippit, Search.io, and Drive Yello.

Universal Commerce

Today, the online retail world resembles the physical one, in that we purchase products from a "store", offering a collection of products for sale. Regardless of where customers discover a brand or product - be it search, content, social, or friends - they are taken to the online store to transact.

Universal commerce presents a way to attach a transactional capability to a product, instantly creating a commerce experience. Why does this matter? By enabling a buyer to seamlessly purchase a product or service, where it is discovered, it permits contextual commerce. There are a range of new contextual commerce experiences that could be created - including collaborative, social, conversational video, and voice commerce.

Products that change the game

Enter Carted - who closely embodies our thesis around the next generation of e-commerce, by embedding commerce within the online experiences that users value the most. Carted's vision is to build the API that powers commerce experiences anywhere on the internet, allowing developers and creators to build a checkout anywhere.

The Carted API connects the fragmented players across the e-commerce ecosystem. This enables platforms, creators, influencers, and developers, who previously would need to integrate with brands and retailers one by one, to sell products directly on their own platform, retain customers and traffic, monetise their audience, and build new e-commerce experiences.

Our thesis: if Carted is able to deliver this important infrastructure, it will shift the relationships between buyer, intermediary, and seller across the value chain; and will enable developers to build contextual commerce experiences in entirely new and interesting ways.

In the spirit of The Art of the Demo, the Carted team have this skill in spades. Carted's demo examples are here and here.

Founders that hustle

Holly Cardew and Mike Angell are the team to solve this problem. They are multi-time company builders and accomplished operators with deep domain expertise in the e-commerce space, complementary skill sets, and relentless hustle. Holly has built four Shopify apps and founded Pixc, helping merchants organise their product catalogs, whilst Mike has experience at Culture Kings, Shopify, and Fast, and is a self-taught developer who founded his first e-commerce business all the way back in 2004. Their unique insight and clarity of vision for Carted is borne from their shared frustration of the experience uncovered when they set out to build Vop, where they created a shoppable Tik Tok feed, and realised no single checkout experience could integrate products from multiple vendors.

A compelling business model

Carted's business model is compelling as it simultaneously drives value for stakeholders across the e-commerce value chain:

• Platforms can earn revenue for their content, own their customers, and build new e-commerce experiences.
• Customers benefit from superior commerce experiences created through contextual commerce, including ease of use and a shorter path to conversion
• Merchants/brands benefit through increased revenue opportunities, gaining new customers and increasing product visibility across a range of platforms.

By providing the infrastructure, Carted has the potential to clip the ticket on e-commerce sales and take a slice of a very large pie, with significant volumes. Revenue opportunities for the API include interchange fees, affiliate commissions, promotional codes and product markups, FX conversion, and API calls.

The seed phase

Carted sits firmly within its Seed phase - and will be turning its focus to building out its product, hiring a stellar team, and beginning to connect a vast product index to a variety of integrations to form their infrastructure. They will be striving to build out the core API and demonstrate value across a few platforms - earning the right to connect parties across e-commerce and then building out a compelling product roadmap.

Our experience and thinking on the future of commerce is how we gained conviction at Tidal to back Carted. We are incredibly excited to partner with Holly and Mike on the journey ahead. Stay tuned for updates on their website (they're hiring), Twitter, and LinkedIn.

A note on the future of commerce thematic

There are a number of components in the broader e-commerce value chain. In this context, we observe the transactional aspect of the e-commerce experience evolving across a spectrum:

• Firstly, a centralised model of aggregation and scale, embodied by Amazon
• Then, a decentralised model of platforms & services for vendors, embodied by Shopify
• Next, a universal commerce model blurs the lines of what a traditional store, merchant, affiliate and more is, and therefore opens up entirely new experiences that are defined by a creative ecosystem.

Carted is building this new and exciting infrastructure for the future of commerce. If you're a visionary founder who is ready to make waves, please reach out via our website.

Thanks to Max Kausman for help drafting this post.

Demos help us experience the product in a way that's not lines of code or marketing bullet points or concepts.

To help us unpack why demos are an essential craft that needs to be honed in start-ups, we talked to four product legends to get their insights, thoughts, and opinions.

• Sherif Mansour: Distinguished Product Manager at Atlassian.
• Mindy Eiermann: Director of Product Management at Intuit.
• Jens Schumacher: Chief Product Officer at Search.io.
• Somya Kapoor: CEO & Co-Founder at TheLoops.

All were kind enough to share their take on The Art of the Demo.

Demos simulate the customer experience

When we asked why they think demos are important, Jens and Somya both spoke of demos as breathing life into projects. Jens believes they make the abstract tangible and provide an opportunity to clearly demonstrate how specific problems are solved. Somya thinks of demos as "windows into the vision", where you distil the idea potential and capture the audience.

Sherif and Mindy agreed. For Sherif, the demo audience simulates the customer, so the presenter has to be very aware of the customer experience during delivery, more than with other modes of presentation. He added that "it’s much more effective to have a meaningful discussion and make prioritisation decisions when you use your demo as a shared language, rather than using a bunch of text and bullet points". Demos simulate reality, whereas bullet points abstract it.

Demos are an opportunity to tell a story

Mindy puts it beautifully when she says that "giving a demo is so much more than showing someone your product. It's about telling a story and doing so in a way that marries customer insights, data, and a product experience to take your audience on the journey." We love this and we wholeheartedly agree.

Demos are a story. A very important part of your product story. They allow you to empathise with customers, understand their challenges and see how to solve their problems. You can't get this effect with a slide deck. Empathy is built when you can put yourself in the shoes of the customer. As Mindy says, "the more effective you can be with creating that empathy and understanding, the more likely you will be to get the support you need to be successful".

Three key demo use cases

1. Transfer knowledge to internal teams
   Demos show how a customer problem has been solved and explain the steps taken to arrive at the solution. This is valuable knowledge that can be used to impact other customer problems, and enable marketing and support teams to explain features more clearly to customers.
2. Drive customer sales
   Demos are a visual and engaging way for the target audience to understand a feature, a whole product and the experience they will receive. The old adage of 'show don't tell' applies here, because it enables the customer to 'see themselves' using a product, achieving a task, solving a problem. Demos create a connection which (hopefully) leads to sales.
3. Show investors your value
   Demos are essential for telling the success story of your product, what it does now, what it can do soon, and where it fits in a customer's life and the market. Investors look for ideas that loudly communicate potential, have a clear purpose and reflect a better reality. Investors want to put their money in a product they can see, not a bullet list of nebulous benefits.

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Our experts share their demo stories

Sherif's demo story

Sometimes demos reveal something that has not been noticed before. Sherif recalls when the team building software for mobile showed how they solved a particular customer problem. But only on mobile. The same problem existed for desktop users, but the solution approach had not been discussed with the desktop engineers. Sherif remembers that "the demo highlighted that we were letting our internal team structures influence the customer experience." The demo showed the need for better information sharing and highlighted a creeping silo problem between teams.

Mindy's demo story

Never underestimate the hunger of a demo audience. Mindy tells us how she was preparing for a huge public product launch and the engineer who was running the demo did a rehearsal with her beforehand. She thought it might be too detailed and make people bored. "Boy, I was wrong" she reflects. "The accountants in the audience were sitting on the edge of their seats that night. They wanted all the detail so that they could understand exactly what impact the new experience would have for them and their firm."

Jen's demo story

You can talk it up all you want, but you've got to show people how things work. "In a world where AI has become a buzzword appearing on every marketing website, it was important for Search.io to demonstrate how easy and practical it is to implement a personalised search experience". Through demo storytelling, Search.io could highlight the personalisation and focus on the "benefit to customers". Jens believes their simple but effective demo has closed the majority of customer deals.

Somya's demo story

During our Seed round raise the product was nascent, but our vision was crisp. While it wasn't quite fake it, till you make it, the demo we shared with Tidal and other investors was expressive enough to convey a rich end to end experience. It communicated the land value proposition, the hook for our target audience and even hinted at our future potential. Akin to Jens, Somya was able to successfully complete her raise in quick time as the demo was a key part of investor conviction.

Expert tips

There is always a before and after

You can demo anything, even if it’s an API change or a bug fix. Make sure to start with the problem and why it was worth solving and make sure everyone is aligned on why the solution is designed in that way.

- Sherif Mansour

Tell a story that people can relate to

Don't just run through the motion and explain what's happening on screen. Focus your energy on a couple of key highlights that you want the viewer to remember.

- Jens Schumacher

KISS - Keep it simple, please!

Not more than one minute and engage the audience every 30-45 seconds - especially in the zoom world or else you are just another screen they are looking at for hours.

- Somya Kapoor

Know your audience

When demoing to senior stakeholders, spend less time on the nitty-gritty and more time on the customer insights, data, and the story. This will help the audience connect the work. For sales team type demos, focus on the customer benefits and concerns to help guide those conversations.

- Mindy Eiermann

In conclusion

If there is a downside to demos, we haven't found one. Demos take concepts and make them real for your teams, your customers, and the people you want to draw in as investors. Keep them short, purposeful and relevant for your audience, and you can't go wrong.

Big thanks to Charlotte Jiang for helping me draft this post and to all our demo experts featured.