I am very happy to announce that I have led the first fundraising for Tettra with an investment of $350K* in their pre-seed round (the total round was about $900K).  I love the team, the market, and the vision and I am excited to help them in their journey to build a great company.  Here is the detail behind my investment thesis.

Why:

Tl;dr: Corporate wikis are tremendously powerful, and the current wikis on the market are old and missing modern features and interfaces.

Employees have lots of questions about how to get things done, and increasingly, they also want to know what the heck is going on both at the executive level and across different teams in the company - especially millennial employees (now the largest part of the workforce).  How do I order a new computer?  Is anyone else at the company working on something like this?  What does the sales team think about our international strategy?  Can I get some feedback on this new product before launch?  What do employees think about this new strategic vision to our employees?

Today all those questions are typically handled by (lots of) email and (lots of) meetings.  But there is a better way.  Tettra can eliminate repeated emails asking the same question.  Tettra can also improve employee engagement and alignment by taking static internal communication and making it dynamic.  I believe that long form content (a wiki like Tettra) is more important to a company than chat.  I’ve seen a company wiki in action, and it is very powerful.

HubSpot Alumni are especially well suited to start this company.  We created a unique culture at HubSpot that companies are emulating over time, and one of the key enabling technologies of that culture was our internal wiki.  Having seen that in action is a big advantage and gives Andy and Nelson very good founder - market fit.

Team:  I’ve known Andy Cook and Nelson Joyce since their time at HubSpot building a freemium product called Leadin.  They have known each other far longer than that, including working together at another startup.  They each have a unique combination of skills - technical and growth (Andy) and design and growth (Nelson) - which lend themselves nicely to a scrappy startup that will pivot more than the best basketball players to find the right product market fit.  This is the kind of scrappy, hard working, coachable, relentless team in which I love to invest.

Market:  The overall market for collaboration within companies is huge.  Divisions of Microsoft and Google (err… Alphabet) play in the space, plus some big independent companies including Atlassian ($5B market cap), Dropbox and Slack.  Similarly, Tettra has the potential to be used by millions and millions of workers every day, and can complement and integrate with many of these products.

Product:  When I first talked with Andy and Nelson, they mainly had ideas and a vision.  Today there is a great product that you should try, but it did not factor into my investment decision at the time - it was basically a pre-product decision.

Financing: Tettra raised a total of $914k from angels and AngelList syndicates on a SAFE with a $4m cap and 20% discount.  There are a bunch of things I love about this financing.  First, 95% of the round came from Boston-area investors.  Second, 52% of the round came through past and present HubSpot employees.  And third, the original angel investors in HubSpot accounted for another 27% of the round. This is all an example of a thriving tech hub creating pillar companies that then go on to found and fund more startups.

* No, the $350K is not all my own money!  I made an angel investment, and my AngelList Syndicate provided the rest of the capital, powered to a large degree by the BOSS Syndicate.  I want to thank Accomplice and their BOSS program for making this possible.  We need more “super angels” in Boston, and this program turns normal angels like me into super angels.  Accomplice is making a hugely important investment into our community and we’re lucky to have them leaning into Boston.