Radius
Darian Shirazi had been one of the first 10 employees at Facebook and later worked on the Sell Your Item team at eBay before studying computer science and philosophy at UC Berkeley. Radius started with a simple problem in B2B marketing: sales and marketing teams were working from contact and company data that was often inaccurate. The company began working on the business around 2011, pivoted out of an earlier project, and launched its product in 2013.
The core of the product is the Radius business graph, a dataset of 20 million companies and 30 million contacts that is refreshed every two weeks. Its key idea is that customers contribute their CRM and sales activity data in an anonymized, aggregated form, which validates phone numbers and email addresses and keeps the data current. Shirazi said the team had to hire a large data science and data engineering group because the product could not be built by three people. The company also had to pass enterprise security reviews, including SOC 2 standards, because it syncs with customers' CRM and marketing automation systems.
Radius began selling in early 2014 with just Shirazi and one other sales rep. Its target customers were enterprise and mid-market companies trying to grow B2B pipeline. Implementation took about 18 days, and the company aimed to get customers running and seeing value within 90 days. Deals often started small and grew: Shirazi said one large logo's deal tripled within eight months. Dreamforce was the company's largest marketing expense each year, and Shirazi said it produced thousands of lead scans and deals that closed in Q4.
The strongest result cited was retention. Shirazi said enterprise customers showed zero churn over the past two years, and that gross monthly churn was under 1 percent. Growth came mostly from expanding use cases and data consumption within accounts rather than from adding seats, and integrations with Marketo, Eloqua, and Salesforce supported that expansion. Shirazi also said Radius was planning a Microsoft Dynamics CRM integration because inbound demand was strong.
At the time of the interview in December 2016, Radius had a few hundred customers, including logos such as Sam's Club, First Data, and American Express, and a team of about 150 people. Shirazi said the company had raised about $100 million from investors including Formation 8, Jolan Stale, Founders Fund, Blue Run Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures. He did not disclose average ACV.
- •The data network effect, where customer CRM activity keeps improving the dataset, makes the product harder for public-data competitors to match.
- •Enterprise retention above 93% and near-zero churn suggest the product delivers measurable pipeline value, which supports expansion.
- •Revenue growth came from use-case and data-consumption upsells in existing accounts, so each customer became more valuable over time.
- •An 18-day implementation and a 90-day value goal shortened the time to upsell, which helped deal sizes grow quickly.
- •Investing in security certifications and enterprise trust early removed a major sales barrier for large companies.
- 1.Start by solving a data quality problem your target buyers already complain about, and design the product so customer usage improves the core data.
- 2.Build security and compliance credentials such as SOC 2 before pursuing enterprise deals, since reviews can lengthen sales cycles.
- 3.Land enterprise customers with a focused use case, then track ROI and expand into additional departments and use cases.
- 4.Keep implementation short, with a goal of showing measurable value within the first 90 days of a contract.
- 5.Pick one large industry event where your buyers gather and measure the pipeline it produces before committing to bigger sponsorship levels.
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