Mutinex co-founder moves to APAC role as company looks to US expansion
Mutinex’s co-founder and global chief customer officer, Matt Farrugia, will move into an APAC-focused role to support the company’s growth in the region, while its latest round of funding is set to fuel its US expansion.
Following the expansion of its Australian customer base and early growth in APAC and the US this year, Mutinex has raised AU$17.5 million in funding, led by Marbruck Investments and supported by EVP and Archangel Ventures. It is now claimed to be valued at AU$132.5 million.
The new capital will fuel efforts in the US, where new local customers are being onboarding across multiple categories.
Mutinex’s president, US and multinational, John Sintras, has been working to rapidly grow the company’s offerings in the market, and said demand for solutions-focused analytics is high.
“…We’re excited to keep growing the team on the ground and rapidly evolving our product to meet the needs of the market,” he said.
“New capital helps us to accelerate both of those things.”
In line with the announcement, and with chief revenue officer Danny Bass now settled in, Farrugia will step away from his global role to focus on accelerating the APAC region.
“We’re pleased to have raised this fresh funding to support our growth into new markets,” said Farrugia and fellow co-founder, Henry Innis.
“We are razor focused on improving our fundamental processes including onboarding speed, usage of data and expanding our predictive analytics capability and suite.”
Mutinex has hit as “exciting inflection point” according to Tom Aouad, investor at Marbruck, and its capabilities combined with its already “impressive” US customer base, sets it apart.
“We’re excited to partner up with the team at Mutinex as their innovative approach and strong momentum have us excited about the future,” Aouad said.
Mutinex recently launched a new MMM platform, Hendren, that lets users ask key marketing effectiveness questions and get instant answers with charts, analysis, and optimisation recommendations based on their data.
It also recently collaborated with UM Australia on a media data integration project, that automates data on their respective platforms.
Meanwhile, last month, it was announced that Mat Baxter, the company’s Asia Pacific chief executive officer would move into a board advisory role. Having only taken on the CEO role in May, he transitioned out of the role at the end of September.
According to Baxter, the decision to step away from the gig was prompted by there “not [being] enough space” for him and the company’s global CEO, co-founder and product leader, Henry Innis, in its day-to-day operations.
Keep up to date with the latest in media and marketing
Got a tip?
Lauren McNamara is the associate editor at Mumbrella, covering the agency beat. She joined in November 2022 as editorial assistant, after completing a Bachelor of Communications (Journalism) at UTS.
Linkedin
topics
Archangel Ventures
capital raise
capital raising
EVP
funding
henry innis
John Sintras
Marbruck Investments
Mat Baxter
Matt Farrugia
Mutinex
Have to respect their ability to get money from people
round 1 – industry ppl
round 2 – $5m
round 3 – $7.5m (including $500k Mat Baxter said publicly he put in)
round 4 – $17.5m
So likely $30m+ in raised funds. A lot of cash. Was this founders/early seed investors taking money off the table or all going to funding the business and have they stayed in.
Approx. 60 staff according to Linkedin. Let’s assume they’re average $200k TC a year. $12m in salaries. Website claims 60 clients. Let’s assume they’re paying $300k PA after kickbacks to agent/agency = $18m in net revenue.
Would there be $6m in computing costs, travel, boat parties, Bondi dinners, offices, jollies, trade media marketing etc? Maybe. Depends how hard the spending is.
But it’s hard to see why the founder(s) would want to dilute to the level they have when the business is 6 years old and seems to have a pretty chunky amount of cost. If the margins are better than the above as a founder you would never dilute and you’d fund expansion with cash flow.
And if you’re an investor you’d probably wonder why at this stage of life it needs to keep raising money so aggressively if the margins are anything like a traditional software business.
Maybe they’re fighting off investors and just taking bags of cash under good conditions and consider why not take the money on offer.
As always, lots of questions on this one. But good luck to them in getting some of that sweet eager VC money.
User ID not verified.
No comments?
User ID not verified.
Pretty obvious isn’t it?
They’re probably at about ~$14m revenue with some US traction.
They’ll have around ~$13m in costs if the 75 people on LinkedIn + offices + expenses.
The back of the hand will be telling them they need similar amounts of cash, maybe a bit less, to get the US to profitability and probably get a good Asia office going, plus there will no doubt be some secondary market transactions floating around each time.
So it seems to make sense this is what they would do. I suspect they’ll raise again at $30m ARR or so to try to keep financing that growth unless they slow down.
User ID not verified.
Well done, great to see a good MarTech story and a sticky product…. 75 jobs created, that is what it is all about creating opportunities!
User ID not verified.
Have the Americans not heard of MMM?
User ID not verified.
According to their vc guy they’ve done 3x3x3x2x2x last 5 years
Revenue per annum based on that growth claim
14m now
7m – 23
3.5m – 22
1.16m 21
388k – 20
129k – 19
So appears to be a 10x rev valuation per raise. Not bad on a business with razor thin margins! Well done Mutinex but time to start making profit as a software business or pivot to being a service business with some software.
User ID not verified.
Significant investment is needed in EQ and DEI training. It’s important the environment becomes psychologically safe, first and foremost.
User ID not verified.
Have your say