TL;DR – We have raised a $23.7M Series A at Standard Metrics to scale our collaboration platform for financial data and operating metrics for the private markets. Our vision is to provide a lingua franca for every stakeholder in the innovation economy.
In 1901, the United States Congress founded an agency called the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) with a mandate to spur innovation and industrial competitiveness by instituting common scientific and technological standards. Imagine the chaos that would ensue if different manufacturers disagreed on the definition of a meter or a kilogram, for example!
Today, much of the innovation and economic growth in our society is driven by the private capital markets, which now constitute over $5T in assets globally between venture capital and private equity (having at least tripled in size over the last decade). Ironically, the private markets operate with few standards and even less software. The lack of standards for what metrics matter and how information should be shared and discussed creates meaningful friction points at every layer of the innovation economy, from companies, to their investors, to their investors’ investors, and beyond.
Most venture capital and private equity firms operate out of Microsoft Office. There is no accepted standard for collecting and comparing portfolio company data like you would see from public company filings, and the manual workflows typically employed are painful, time-consuming, and inconsistent. The portfolio companies don’t have it any better — investor relations is becoming an emerging need as cap tables grow larger at earlier stages and companies are stuck managing their metrics and investors out of offline spreadsheets and email, a challenge we outlined in a previous post titled Broken Investor Relations. Finally, the limited partners of these funds are stuck pouring through various legacy data rooms full of PDF files to understand what’s happening with their fund-level investments. The SEC has even recently proposed rule changes to require standardized regular reporting on fund performance from private equity GPs to LPs for the first time.
As a group of former investors and operators, our team has experienced these problems first hand, and we have dedicated ourselves to solving them for the past two years. Today, we’re thrilled to share that our company — formerly known as Quaestor, now called Standard Metrics – has raised a $23.7M Series A from an amazing consortium of investors led by 8VC. Packy McCormick from Not Boring did a terrific write-up on our company’s strategy and round of financing, which you can find published here.
Our vision from day one at Standard Metrics has been to build a collaboration platform for financial data and business metrics, providing a lingua franca (common language) for every stakeholder in the innovation economy. We started by tackling some of the most frustrating manual workflows that exist around investor relations. We have assembled an ambitious team and built a network of dozens of venture capital firms, many of whom have now invested in our company, and over a thousand companies globally who are using our software to track the metrics and relationships that are most important to them. Standard Metrics’ automated portfolio monitoring product for venture capital firms and core investor relations tools for companies are the first steps in a long journey to build better infrastructure across this industry.
Standards matter. With the support of firms like 8VC, Spark Capital, Alpha Edison, January Capital, First Trust Capital Partners, Slack Fund, Fin VC, Socii Capital, Not Boring Capital, Gaingels, and many other fantastic funds and angels, we are building a critical mass of investors and customers who care deeply about how the private markets function and are coming together to build those standards for the first time.
If you’re interested in seeing how our software can help your firm or company, please visit our website standardmetrics.io.
And if you’re as passionate about this topic as we are, we’d love to hear from you. We’re hiring on all fronts (engineering, sales, customer success, product, etc.) and you can find all of our open job descriptions and ways of getting in touch here.
To our customers, investors, and supporters — thank you for your help so far on this journey. We have a lot to prove, and we look forward to serving you in the years to come.
Source: Standard Metrics