DataPostie: from application to round formation

DataPostie was one of close to 2,000 applications we received for Focal in May 2023. They were also one of:

• The 250 companies founded that same year
• The 951 applicants that came from an underrepresented background
• The 477 companies who classified themselves as a SaaS platform
• The 318 applications that were recommended to Focal by an investor

We didn’t have the luxury of being well informed when looking at DataPostie’s Focal application, as founder Kabalan was one of 21,000 founders in 2023 that were building in stealth: no deck, no website, just a LinkedIn URL and an 8-word elevator.

Fortunately, unearthing stellar founders is a VC’s cornerstone, and with the help of our friends at Episode 1, we were able to over-index Kabalan himself through a talent algorithm (more on Episode 1’s data strategy here).

Ultimately, behind every company’s success is a great team. Understanding how talents operate and behave across stages of the private market is becoming a must for the modern investor. Kabalan, prior to DataPostie, spent four years at Applied Predictive Technologies in product development and sales before being acquired by Mastercard for $600m in 2015. Intuition led him to Looker as a Sales Engineer before the data analytics startup was acquired by Google for $2.6B, where he would then go on to work as a Customer Engineering Manager. Kabalan is building and validating DataPostie with close help from advisors he worked with at Google and Looker.

What Kabalan and the team have built

DataPostie helps companies safely and efficiently monetise and share their data.

Kabalan and the team provide a B2B SaaS platform that sits directly on top of a company’s data infrastructure, creates an attractive user portal for external users to interact with and acquire data, and takes care of the security, anonymisation, and delivery aspects of the data sharing.

The team’s experience with Focal

Making something accessible is something that resonated with us here at Focal. That, paired with the track record of working in fast-paced environments and in one case, one of the world’s largest software companies made it a no-brainer to make our shortlist.

My experience with Focal is fantastic, and I highly recommend any product-led founder to apply to their demo day. Within weeks, DataPostie’s concept was seen by 200 VCs. With nothing but an elevator pitch, we were contacted by 10 of the UK’s top VC firms, before we even started fundraising.

Kabalan Gaspard, founder @ DataPostie

Where they’re going next?

We’re glad to give the company a helping hand out of stealth mode.

Over the next 12 months, the team’s approach is to validate the product with design partners & build up their sales pipeline, after which, they’ll be seeking to raise a pre-seed round.

Are you a founder raising pre-seed to Series A? Sign up for our next demo day at gofocal.vc