Why We Invested: WEVO

Our second investment as a group is in WEVO, a Boston-based company that optimizes digital experiences and campaigns before going live, saving months of iterations and unlocking new revenue. Similar to TBD Angels’ first investment in Folia Health, WEVO’s combination of people, product, and market was hard to beat.

• People. It always starts with the team. WEVO has an experienced team with strong go-to-market experience, technical depth, and previous exits. In fact, some of us have known Co-founder & CEO Nitzan Shaer (previously at Skype) for more than a decade when he helped us at a previous company that led to a 9-figure exit. In many ways, our investment in WEVO was coming full circle. WEVO Co-founder & President Janet Muto, former CMO of Constant Contact, makes an unbeatable founding team.
• The product and technology platform is a game-changer. It enables websites to introduce great user experiences from day one of launch, instead of the industry norm of AB testing trial and error. The technology leverages human-augmented AI and a 60 million panel to pinpoint why a website’s visitors leave without taking action.
• On the market and traction side, there’s strong demand and momentum with the Fortune 5,000. As companies scramble to improve the effectiveness of their digital experiences, driven by current world events, demand for WEVO’s offering has further accelerated. On the heels of significant customer wins, March delivered a record usage of the WEVO platform. There are now 25+ enterprise clients including Intuit, Wells Fargo, and LogMeIn. This team knows how to land big customers. With this traction, the investment became a no-brainer with the significantly reduced execution and financing risks.

WEVO customers generate more revenue from day 1

Smarter together

Since last month’s TBD Angels launch, more angel investors have joined us, and in the WEVO deal, we had a broad participation, many with direct relevant industry expertise. Our premise that operators with specific functional expertise, current industry connections, and relevant experiences would…

1. give us the ability to have better insights and decision making
2. provide more value to the entrepreneurs of our portfolio companies
3. positively alter the trajectories of their growth

This compelling dynamic played out as the collective group looked towards one of our own members, Sarah Hodkinson, for her insights during the evaluation of this deal. During the day, Sarah is General Manager of SmarterTravel and is in the sweet spot of the target market segment for WEVO’s service. Off the top of her head, Sarah instantly rattled off a few piercing questions, and those insights were already directly aligned with the next key features on the product roadmap. What’s more, the other angels benefited greatly from her subject matter expertise, both for this specific investment as well as honing their skills as angel investors for the next deal.

Several other investments are in the works at TBD Angels, so we are most definitely open for business.

David Chang is one of the members of TBD Angels