Velocity

David Dunne spent 11 years at Edelman building their digital business from the ground up, eventually running a global operation. During that time, he became fascinated by how technology could fundamentally change marketing. He'd been an early customer to startups like Buzz Matrix, Radiance Six, and Buddy Media, watching firsthand how their tools gave Edelman a competitive edge. But as he helped these companies grow, a thought crystallized: he wanted to build something like this himself. At 43, with prior startup exits and real estate investments providing a cushion, Dunne left Edelman to start Velocity.

Dunne sketched out the idea in his kitchen at the end of 2009 and officially launched in 2010. His co-founder Young Reg, a Norwegian who'd worked alongside him at Edelman, joined from day one. The founding thesis was clear: use data to make marketing smarter, better, faster. But as with most startups, the initial vision needed refinement. Rather than guessing what the market wanted, Dunne chose to work closely with customers over years to develop a product that fit their actual needs. He bootstrapped with friends and family, raising about $3 million in the early years while also leveraging his own capital.

Velocity's early customers were large global agencies—the natural fit given Dunne's background at Edelman. These enterprise relationships became the foundation, but they came with a long sales cycle (up to a year) and significant acquisition costs (potentially hundreds of thousands per deal). The product was built around licensing their SaaS platform to agencies' data analysts and data scientists, helping them extract insights from exponentially growing datasets. Pricing was based on data streams—the number of sources and specific data feeds a customer pulled—rather than seats or API calls. This model created natural expansion revenue as customers scaled.

Velocity's secret weapon was customer obsession. By achieving over 90% annual retention and working deeply with customers for years, Dunne built a sticky product. Customers who saw their analysts deliver insights 5x faster than with manual Excel-and-PowerPoint workflows stuck around. The company expanded beyond pure agencies into brands, publishers, data science consultancies, and consulting firms—each with different go-to-market strategies and acquisition economics. By 2022–2023, as the institutional round closed for $12 million, Velocity had under 500 customers but was doing over $3 million per month in recurring revenue. The pivot toward AI wasn't about riding hype; it was about addressing real customer pain: analysts arriving to work facing mountains of data and no insights. The new AI release aims to flip the script—analysts walk in to a dashboard of pre-generated insights, then dive into the data behind them.

With 52 employees and $15 million total raised (friends/family + institutional), Velocity is accelerating growth through product innovation and geographic expansion. They're rolling out automated self-serve capabilities so customers can load 100+ data sources without hand-holding from Velocity's team, reducing support costs and enabling faster scaling. The AI release launching next month represents the next chapter—moving beyond human-powered insight derivation to machine-accelerated analysis. Dunne's thesis remains unchanged: data-informed creativity wins. But he's betting that by giving every analyst perfect data and AI-assisted insights faster, their customers' creative teams will ultimately outcompete those with slower, manual workflows.