Mucker’s first meeting with Emotive happened in November of 2018, though our initial investment wouldn’t happen until 18 months later in May 2020 when we would lead their Series A. Today, Emotive announces their $50M Series B closed just 7 months after to accelerate growth after a transformative year for eCommerce brands.
When meeting with founders, we often find ourselves answering questions about what to expect with our diligence process and timeline between the first conversation and a term sheet. We normally tell founders we can be fast and turn things around in just a few days if needed. That is certainly true, but in many cases, an investment is the result of interactions and a broader relationship-building exercise spanning both years and product iterations.
In the case of Emotive, we were fortunate enough to have expanded our investment strategy just as they were expanding their business. Since our inception, Mucker has focused on writing seed stage checks to invest in compelling companies and founders. In 2020 we kicked off a separate fund called Mucker Early to focus on investing just past the seed stage, writing $3-5m checks when companies have found product-market fit and are ready to scale. After meeting Emotive much earlier in their journey, we finally invested as one of our first three companies in the Early fund.
Founders sometimes feel that decisions from investors are permanent verdicts on a company, but the reality is far from that. When it comes to Emotive, we didn’t invest at the seed stage, but Brian and the team kept us updated on their consistent progress. As they continued to hit their plans and build out a groundbreaking product, we simply couldn’t ignore what was obvious traction and validation from a rapidly growing community of happy customers. Although we met them first in 2018, both the company and world as we know it would look profoundly different by the time we invested, signing a term sheet just two months into quarantine.
One of the missteps of traditional marketing is to overlook the consumer as an individual, instead addressing the masses with impersonal, generalized communication. Brian and Zach set out to build not just a conversational text message platform for eCommerce brands, but to create one-to-one, human-to-human marketing as a new category, centering the consumer as a unique individual with unique needs. The results they deliver for their customers include a minimum 5x ROI guarantee, and the growth they’ve seen is a testament to the value Emotive’s technology delivers at scale. The company experienced 466% revenue growth in 2020, surpassing all revenue and traction goals outlined pre-COVID.
We are thrilled to welcome our friends at CRV who led Emotive’s $50M Series B, with the addition of Stripes who also participated in this round. One of our core philosophies at Mucker involves telling every company we work with not to focus on the next round but on the crucial inner workings of the business. These events and publicized fundraising milestones are not goals, but rather the means to achieve the larger objective of building a market-defining business. In the case where there is another round, we want founders to be in a position to raise because they choose to, not because they have to.
It has been encouraging to see the Emotive team follow this exact course, and choose great new investors to help them continue to deliver on the ambitious course they’ve set for the company. We share their ambitious vision for how eCommerce technology will further expand and deepen the relationship between brands and their customers and look forward to supporting their journey ahead.
