Exciting News: Cogsy Raises $6M Seed Funding

We’re thrilled to announce our $6 million seed round, led by Accel Partners. Here’s what we’re doing with it.

Let’s take a quick trip down memory lane.

Lotus 1-2-3 was first released in 1983, and Microsoft Excel followed a couple of years later in 1987. That makes spreadsheets 39-odd years old today.

Spreadsheets are so much more powerful today, and it is at least partly true that many SaaS solutions are competing against “an intern with a spreadsheet.” It’s a malleable and trusted part of most businesses, including modern retail brands.

And as much help as spreadsheets contributed to building businesses, the technology was not created for the dynamic, high-growth environment in which retail brands find themselves today.

Grabbing data from multiple sources, cleaning it up, reformatting it, getting it into your spreadsheet model, and combating human error are all jobs to be done to get any insights from spreadsheets. Not to mention the discipline of ensuring data accuracy and keeping spreadsheets up-to-date.

We started Cogsy with a mission to pursue something better. A full-spectrum solution that can be an extra Head of Operations for modern retail brands.

Now, we are incredibly excited to share that we’ve completed a $5M seed round led by Accel Partners. (Alongside our pre-seed round earlier this year, this brings our total funding to date to $6M.)

We’re also grateful for having a star-studded support cast in the form of Sugar Capital, Riverpark VC, Bain Capital Ventures, Automattic/WooCommerce, and Brian Long.

Seth Pierrepont, a partner at Accel, said:

“"Few sectors have evolved as fast as ecommerce in recent years. Retail brands are taking advantage of this new landscape and orienting themselves around a digital-first approach. Yet when it comes to their ops functions, many are still using yesterday's playbook. Cogsy is helping brands turn their ops function into engines of growth."

Raising this capital really empowers us to build.

Alongside finalising this transaction, we have worked hard to build a team that will create a best-in-class solution to empower modern retail brands to pursue operational excellence. And we’re growing quickly.

We started the month of November with five team members and, as of December, are now a team of 15.

But what’s really exciting is that I’ve got four former Conversio colleagues back on the team. (This includes Stefano Sala, my first hire at Conversio and now my co-founder.)

Scott Friend, a partner at Bain Capital Ventures, said:

“"Adii and his team have the perfect combination of deep commerce-ecosystem experience, modern product design brilliance, and analytic rigor. All of which are required for online retail brands to truly put data to work to optimize marketing and merchandising."

(We’re continuing to grow the team. Read about our culture and values if you’re interested in joining a group of awesome humans with a big vision.)

But raising capital and using that to attract an amazing team does not constitute success in its own right. Success comes from the next steps we take.

On this note, the team at Riverpark Ventures shared: “Legacy solutions for inventory management have historically been confined to large enterprises due to the cost of integration and configuration. With the proliferation of the Shopify ecosystem, the long-tail of ecommerce brands increasingly require a tool to systematize a manual, error-prone process. We’re proud to support Adii and the Cogsy team on their mission to arm brands with greater agility, alignment, and control over their largest area of investment: inventory.”

Without giving away too much, here’s what to expect from Cogsy in 2022:

We drive actions. Brands have enough data already; taking the right move at the right time remains a challenge. Cogsy is not a reporting tool or a record system; instead, we always want to think about how to drive and facilitate actions. If we highlight an insight for our customers, we will link it to an action that they can take.
We’re not building a spreadsheet on steroids. If we built an interface that looked like a spreadsheet, we wouldn’t be pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. Cogsy’s mission is to make an exponential leap forward with workflows and empower brands to operate outside the current bounds of spreadsheet software.
Bring your own tech stack. Cogsy will be ubiquitous and empower our customers to use us regardless of the other choices they’ve made for best-in-class tools in their tech stack. We’re not opinionated about those other tools and will treat every data source equally as we mine for insights.

So much has changed in the nearly 40 years since spreadsheets were invented.

In the words of Brian Sugar of Sugar Capital:

“"Cogsy's solution is perfectly positioned at a critical point in the commerce lifecycle. Today's companies need accurate real-time operations solutions more than ever. The Cogsy team has the experience and product vision to bring the most compelling operations management system to the market, and we are proud to be partnering with them."

While Lotus 1-2-3 was revolutionary in its day, Cogsy aims to be progressive in helping retail brands move beyond spreadsheets by streamlining their planning functions to be more empowering and proactive.

If you’d like to hear more, tune in to the podcast episode we recorded about what this fundraising means for our future.

Want to see Cogsy in action? Try it free for 14 days.

** Thanks to our pre-seed investors who backed Cogsy based on only an idea: