Our Partnership with Convex: The Industry Cloud Platform for Commercial Services

Emergence is excited to officially announce our partnership with Convex, the leading industry cloud platform for commercial services companies. We led Convex’s Series A in March 2020. Today, the company shared the news of its $39 million Series B. 

We first met Charlie, Blake, Brandon, and Sven from Convex in 2019 after the company graduated from Y Combinator. Given our history of backing iconic industry cloud companies, we are always on the lookout for SaaS businesses that have the potential to transform large vertical markets. As we got to know Convex’s team and began to understand their vision for building a software company that caters to the huge and important commercial services industry, we quickly became intrigued by what they were building.

The commercial services market is big (by our estimates over $1 trillion in annual global revenue) and a bit under the radar. Companies in this industry provide services to commercial building owners. These services include those focused on HVAC, building automation, security, fire safety, elevators, electrical, janitorial, and more. Like many other industries, the commercial services market has taken time to embrace technology broadly. Now, however, many companies in commercial services are accelerating the pace at which they are investing in software. This trend has been hastened by COVID, which has encouraged businesses of all types to deploy more technology. In a recent survey, Gartner found that 70% of businesses, across a broad range of industries, plan to increase their investment in digital initiatives this year as a result of pressures imposed by the pandemic. 

As we’ve seen in other vertical markets, the key to unlocking transformative demand for new software is a product offering that is tailored to the needs of an industry. Building such a product requires a true understanding of end users—and a team that knows how to translate that understanding into delightful software. Charlie has a unique perspective on this market as his family owns a commercial HVAC service business. He grew up seeing the challenges this business encountered, and over time, he began to think about how better software might help his family’s company. Charlie’s understanding of the industry combined with Blake’s product management skills, Brandon’s engineering prowess, and Sven’s operational leadership, have enabled Convex to build a first product that fundamentally changes how sales teams operate within commercial services businesses. That first product is Atlas, an elegant SaaS application that combines robust data on commercial buildings with industry-specific sales workflow and analytics. Many of the largest companies in the commercial services market have adopted Atlas and have made it a key part of their customer acquisition and account management workflows.

We are humbled to support Convex’s mission to serve as the most important partner to digital-first commercial services businesses. The last 18 months since we first started working with the company have been an absolute joy—and we look forward to many more years working alongside them.

Congratulations, Charlie, Blake, Brandon, Sven, and team!