Why We’re Royally Excited About Regal.io

I fell in love with Regal.io in a random field outside of Denver International Airport. Listening to Regal.io’s Co-Founder and CEO Alex Levin lay out his vision as we walked past roaming buffalo, my neck hurt from nodding along. We’d been introduced shortly before by one of their seed investors, Satya Patel from Homebrew. When we met on Zoom, there was an immediate mind meld; our team had developed a thesis articulating the same vision for the future of customer engagement software months before (more below). 

Alex and I wanted to meet in person before finalizing the decision to partner. Unfortunately, travel between Steamboat Springs and San Francisco isn’t easy, so we decided to split(ish) the difference and meet up in Denver. Alex met me at my gate, and we took an Uber together to the nearest open field. We wandered around for three hours, covering everything from the intricacies of phone carrier caller ID technology to our parents’ respective entrepreneurial journeys. 

The authenticity with which he approached the problem Regal.io is solving and the values-driven approach he and co-founder Rebecca Greene prioritized in building the company resonated deeply. I flew home giddy with excitement (and with a nasty Colorado sunburn). Shortly thereafter, we led Regal.io’s Series A, alongside our friends at Founder Collective and Homebrew.

Rewind a bit. We’ve been students of customer engagement software since our firm’s very first investment, backing Salesforce in 2002. The premise for Salesforce was to track “explicit sales data” such as customer names, assigned AE, meetings, etc. Since then, there’s been an explosion of ways in which companies interact with prospects and a concurrent explosion in time-series data documenting these interactions. Amazingly, none of this surface area is being recorded with today’s systems of record. 

These legacy systems are limited to addressing questions of “who” and “what”. We believe the next generation of customer engagement will be built on event-driven systems that layer in the “when”. Event-driven systems will enable companies to connect with customers in the moments and contexts that work best for them. My teammates Joe and Wenz lay out more of our event-driven thinking here.

Event-driven data unlocks opportunities that weren’t previously addressable. For instance, B2C sales. Common wisdom has held that go-to-market for consumer brands should be all marketing and no sales (just self-serve conversion). While involving a sales rep may have been cost-prohibitive for B2C brands in the old world, leveraging event data on what content prospects have explored and when allows brands to reach out with tailored, timely messages. Unsurprisingly, this strategy boosts conversion rates meaningfully and makes sales in B2C a very profitable channel.

This is exactly what Regal.io does. Alex and Rebecca met as execs at Handy (now $ANGI). They had a ton of prospects submit their info on the Handy website but many failed to complete a purchase.  Alex and Rebecca looked around for a customer engagement solution that would help them call/text these hot leads at the moment they were hot, leveraging the context of the journey they’d been on thus far. To their surprise, nothing existed off the shelf to do this. They hacked together a system to get them part of the way there and were amazed at the improvements in conversion. After Handy was sold, they teamed up to properly build the system they had wanted.

This was in late 2020. By Jan 2021, they had an early product in market. Over the past 18 months, they’ve grown from a prototype to a fully-featured platform, from two to 80 employees, and have grown revenue faster than even Zoom did at the same stage. Most importantly, they’ve driven tremendous ROI for their customers, creating over $500M in revenue by improving conversion rates an average of 25%.

When we invest in a company, we aspire to be their Most Important Partner (it’s our second  core value of three). An important part of this work is partnering closely with the founders to build out their exec team. Recruiting for Regal.io has been a dream. Shortly after investing, we introduced Alex and Rebecca to two of the most impressive GTM execs in our network and both fell as hard as I did at the opportunity to help fulfill Regal.io’s potential.

The good news is that we continue to hire across the board. Come join us!