Intermix

Paula LaPasse had spent a couple of years consulting after selling GoGrid (which he co-founded in 2007) to Datapipe in 2011 for an undisclosed amount. In 2013, he joined a crash reporting company called Crashlytics (later acquired by Google and renamed Fabric) where he met co-founder Lars, the head of business development. While working with massive datasets—their library ran on over one billion devices across Apple and Android—Paula realized something powerful: they were sitting on goldmines of data they weren't monetizing. Lars approached him with an idea: what if they could package and sell this industry data to private equity firms and consultancies hungry for mobile market insights? "I said, sure, you know, how hard could that possibly be?" Paula recalls.

When Paula hired a data scientist to extract and organize the data, the reality hit immediately. The data scientist said: "Okay, great, where's the data?" Paula replied, "It's in all of these databases." The data scientist's response was blunt: "I need it all in one place. It needs to be clean and complete and correct." Three months of intensive work later, Paula had organized the data into a usable format. Talking to peers in the industry, he realized almost every company faced this same challenge—making data scientists productive with fragmented, messy data. That insight led him and Lars to leave Crashlytics and start Intermix. They launched at the end of 2016 and remarkably achieved their first dollar of revenue just six months after writing the first line of code for the business.

Intermix's initial customers came from Paula and Lars's deep network in Silicon Valley accumulated over 20 years. They signed up early alpha users to a "not fully baked product super early on." The pricing model was straightforward: enterprise SaaS with annual subscriptions ranging from $50,000 to $100,000 ACV. As Paula explains, "What you get for that is a single dashboard whereby your data teams...get a single view into all the apps that are connected, all the users that are running queries, the way that data flows through that system."

By the time of this interview, Intermix had scaled to 25 customers and discovered their most effective growth channels: content marketing and intelligent cold outreach. Paula developed a surprisingly effective customer acquisition strategy—scraping job boards like Indeed for the word "Redshift" (Amazon's data warehouse product), which appears rarely enough that it reliably indicates which companies use the platform. They'd then identify employees with relevant titles and conduct phone outreach. "That's a really good question," Paula noted when asked how they built these lists. "The word redshift is pretty not common in job descriptions. And so if you scrape indeed, for example, you can kind of figure out which companies are using it."

This systematic approach, combined with content about data lakes and performance monitoring, created a low-cost customer acquisition engine. By the time they raised a $3 million seed round from Uncork Capital in May, they were spending approximately $10,000 to acquire customers with $50,000+ ACV—yielding roughly four-month payback periods.

Intermix had recently discovered an even more valuable niche: Fortune 500 enterprises undergoing digital transformation. As large companies migrate from traditional data warehouses like Oracle and Teradata to the cloud, they experience significant pain points—and Intermix is there to solve them. The company was growing at over 12% per month, with 30% of monthly growth coming from customer expansion (customers doubling down on their usage and paying more). With nine employees distributed across San Francisco, New York, and Europe, they were on track to pass $1 million ARR within Q2, up from approximately $30,000 per month a year prior—more than doubling year-over-year. Most impressively, they maintained less than 5% annual revenue churn while expanding existing customers by more than 5%, achieving over 100% net revenue retention. Paula was openly exploring venture debt options like Lighter Capital to fuel growth without further equity dilution, with plans to raise another round about a year out.