Mutiny plans to ‘grow off profitability’ after raising $2.4m seed funding
Mutiny, the marketing analytics software company founded by Matt Farrugia and Henry Innis has just raised $2.4 million to continue development and expansion of its SaaS platform, with plans to “grow off profitability”.
The recent $2.4 million seed funding round was led by the co-founders of Eucalyptus, Charlie Gearside and Alexey Mitko, former Starcom chairman John Sintras and notable advertising figure Russel Howcroft.
Earlier this year, the founders of the SaaS company told Mumbrella that their sole focus is “transforming the industry”, rejecting the idea of a potential float or exit any time soon. The pair said in August last year that it aims to have $1 billion worth of ads in its software platform WarChest within 12 months, a target which Innis previously told Mumbrella it is reaching “fairly fast”.
After opening a second office in Sydney last year, Mutiny plans to continue further expansion with this funding round, including enhancement of the platform’s self-service onboarding capability and an entrance into the US market.
“I think any Australian business needs to prove out that their model can work in the US to truly prove out global scale. What this round of funding will allow us to do is to understand how the model works in the US, and to see how the model is executing over there,” said Innis.
Investors in the most recent seed funding round include former Starcom chairman John Sintras, advertising guru Russel Howcroft, former STW Group COO Chris Savage, as well as Eucalyptus cofounders Charlie Gearside and Alexey Mitko.
On his plans for the next year of growth, Innis said “Our growth expectations are tempered around that 200% mark relatively. That’s a relatively low number for being VC-backed, and it’s low against our historical growth trend on Warchest as well. But I would say we tempered that because of the markets being the way they are at the moment.”
In addition to US expansion plans, Munity aims to finance further capabilities of the platform, enabling it to generate automated insights for the customers.
“I think our growth expectations are obviously quite rapid. The markets are relatively uncertain, so it’s hard to put a really firm committed number on it. However, we do believe that this round gets us to a strong degree of profitability to then make our next decision as to how we want to grow, expand, or raise capital.”
When asked if Mutiny was open to courting more VC funding in the upcoming months, Innis was firm that the focus was on profitability first for capital, wanting the platform the reflect the general growth trend of SaaS from the last five years.
“We are more focused on getting to profitability. Given how the markets and capital are working at the moment, that will naturally give us options to either raise capital on our terms, or it’ll give us the option to keep going on our terms.”
Innis pinned the Atlassian business model as inspiration for Mutiny’s growth, noting that the software behemoth didn’t need to raise significant amounts of capital to see the growth that it did.
“Broadly speaking, the past five years of SaaS have been defined by growth, not profitability. And we’re probably seeing that dynamic flip now. So understanding that dynamic, particularly within capital markets, is very important. I would note that businesses like Atlassian built billion dollar businesses without necessarily needing to raise lots and lots of funding.
“I would anticipate us trying to follow a similar route to an Atlassian, than, say, some other SaaS businesses which have raised lots and lots rounds of funding; those highly frequent rounds can be quite dilutive to founders and investors.”
“Software as a service business models tend to be highly capital efficient. We’re trying to follow the growth pattern of growing off profitability rather than trying to grow off seed capital round.”
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topics
Atlassian
funding
henry innis
marketing analytics
Matt Farrugia
Mutiny
Russel Howcroft
SAAS
seed investment
Warchest
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