Investing in Matik

Copy, paste, copy, paste… repeat 20x more. From Excel to Powerpoint and back again. This is an all too familiar motion to analysts, sales reps, customer success managers, and more, preparing data-rich presentations for business reviews, product feature roadmaps, and beyond. This painstaking process of tracking down relevant data and visualizing it in a presentation probably sounds familiar to most working professionals because presentations are an effective and influential means of storytelling for a business. So many of us strive to personalize presentations for the most impact, but the process is often incredibly manual and bespoke. 

Design, visuals, and storyline aside, we also know how important data is in creating a narrative, and presentations can impact company decisions. One prominent use case for data-driven presentations is the quarterly business review, or “QBR”, which is very popularly used between customer success managers (CSMs) and customers. These presentations require real-time updates to customer and product data in order to have productive conversations around how much more value could be delivered in the future, teeing up revenue generating conversations around up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. Instead of focusing on customer conversations, CSMs bear the time-intensive and manual responsibility of personalizing all of these presentations. One CSM described the process as a “piecemeal nightmare” that often takes up to four hours to prepare for a single customer. Considering that it’s fairly typical for a CSM to have >100 accounts, all of whom need a quarterly touchpoint, that comes out to compiling greater than ten presentations each week, shifting their focus from strategic initiatives to spreadsheets. 

There is perhaps no one who appreciates this problem more than the cofounders of Matik, Nik and Zak. In his prior job at LinkedIn, Nik worked on an internal solution to facilitate this presentation-building process for the company’s go-to-market teams, and led the eventual redesign of the solution. But knowing how universal this problem was, he was always itching to build a company to solve it. Thus, Matik was born. Matik’s product hosts customer presentation templates and connects to a variety of data sources – including data warehouses, CRMs, and BI tools – so the content can be personalized and dynamic. Unlike many other next-gen presentation software, Matik is tailored for existing GSuite and Microsoft users without requiring them to switch platforms. It automatically generates personalized presentations in a matter of minutes, and this is done natively in PowerPoint or Google Slides so that the user can still edit the presentations to their preference. No matter how many times we see the product demo, the magical feeling it evokes never ceases to bring a smile to our faces (while also causing all of us to wish we could have used Matik in prior jobs).  

Every customer we spoke to during our diligence process raved about the product and how much time it saves them, allowing their CSMs to spend more time on strategic work. The magnitude of Matik’s impact can’t be understated: numerous customers told us how the time savings went as far as changing how their companies thought about building out their organizations, because Matik fundamentally changed the math around headcount planning. For example, one startup customer who walked us through their ROI thinking said Matik saved their customer success team 40 hours a week, and additionally saved the data science team 40 hours per quarter. They said “if Matik didn’t exist, my only other option would be to hire a FTE to do this manually.”

And the QBR use case is only one example of where Matik can make a significant difference. In a world where customers are increasingly trying products before buying them, sales conversations need to reflect the data from pre-sales interactions and customers have come to expect personalized presentations. Many of Matik’s customers who initially adopted the product for their CSMs have expanded their deployments to their sales teams. Still, data-powered presentations are just the beginning for Matik. There are so many forms of static documents that can be enhanced by making the data dynamic, like financial reports, marketing and product materials, board decks, and even emails. The premise of automating insights is ubiquitous and Matik should be the go-to solution for automatically generating any document that is data-driven in nature and used for storytelling – and that’s a lot of documents!

Nik and Zak are deeply thoughtful while also being extremely ambitious about bringing this vision to life. They’ve surrounded themselves with a driven team who are just as passionate about helping deliver for their customers. We are thrilled to lead Matik’s Series A and join them on this journey.

***