Avenu
Avenu was founded in 2014 by Pietaro Suvanto and two co-founders. The product is a software tool that starts with a company's legal business ID and website, then layers on context and predictions from many other information sources. The goal, as Suvanto put it, is to understand more about organizations around the world than anybody else.
The core of the technology is the business ID, which Suvanto described as the key that unlocks everything else the system knows about a company. Avenu's advantage, in his telling, is its own data. The company has not bought API access from any data provider, and it says it owns every data point in its system. Its strongest asset is Nordic registry data, because companies in the Nordics are required to publicly file financial figures. That data becomes a training set for estimating revenue in markets where it is not public, such as the Netherlands.
Avenu's sales motion is direct. The team uses its own software to find prospects that match its ideal profile, such as digitally oriented staffing and logistics companies that are investing in modern marketing and expanding into new markets. Reps then call those companies, pitch them, and run a demo. Pricing is discussed at roughly 400 to 500 euros per month, with a buy-and-try approach. Around 60 to 70 percent of the 80-person team works in sales, marketing, support, or customer success.
The business reported about 1,000 paying customers, with an average payment of about $400 per month and a range from a few hundred to thousands of dollars. Monthly customer churn was about 1%, and customer acquisition cost was around 3,000 euros. Suvanto estimated customer lifetime value at 20,000 to 30,000 euros, but acknowledged that the renewal history was still short because the company was so young.
As of January 2017, Avenu had offices in Helsinki, Stockholm, Oslo, Amsterdam, and New York, with the US operation only a few weeks old. The company had not raised outside capital and was open to raising near the end of 2017. Suvanto's target was to reach about $880,000 in monthly recurring revenue, which would be a $10 million run rate, and he suggested a $45 to 50 million pre-money valuation would be realistic.
- •Owning the underlying data rather than renting it from providers gives Avenu a defensible moat and better margins.
- •Nordic public-filing requirements give Avenu a rare training dataset, which lets it estimate figures for markets where that information is hidden.
- •Using its own product to find prospects turns the sales process into a live proof of concept, which supports a high-touch demo motion.
- •Roughly 1% monthly churn at about $400 per month means revenue compounds reliably while acquisition costs are recovered.
- •Growing to about 1,000 customers while self-funded shows that demand from enterprise buyers was strong enough to fund growth from revenue alone.
- 1.Start by securing a unique, hard-to-replicate data source, such as public registry data, and build your core product around it.
- 2.Use your own product to build target lists of prospects that match your ideal customer profile.
- 3.Pair outbound calls with live demos, and offer a buy-and-try subscription at a clear monthly price.
- 4.Track monthly churn and customer acquisition cost from the start so you can judge whether the unit economics hold.
- 5.Keep the team weighted toward sales and support in early stages, since selling is the main growth lever.
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