Growth Stories – The Importance of Cultivating Relationships
For several years BigPanda has established itself as a category leader in the AIOps space. Recently, BigPanda has raised $20 million from top customers UBS and Wells Fargo in an extension to their $190 million Series D earlier this year at a valuation of $1.2 billion.
In this installment of our Growth Stories video series, our managing partner Shay Grinfeld sits down with BigPanda CEO and co-founder Assaf Resnick to discuss the early days of BigPanda, its challenges, and what it means to form the right partnerships.
Fast forward to today, BigPanda continues to prove its leadership in resolving the tsunami of IT outages and alerts, and we’re excited to be a part of the many exciting developments on their horizon.
What drove Greenfield to invest in BigPanda?
Shay
We knew Assaf when we was working in Sequoia Capital - we actually collaborated, shared ideas together, and thought about investing in similar companies.
When we saw Assaf starting his own company, we got excited. We knew we had to track him. We love his partner Elik, the staff, and we knew something great was on the horizon.
We then continued to see their area of focus, which was a no brainer. It was an obvious need in the marketplace. We said, “wait a minute, we have great people, great ideas, wonderful market - let’s stay in close touch.”
From our perspective, the relationship never starts when we invest; it starts way before that. So we tracked Assaf and Elik for about eight quarters, saw all of their struggles in the beginning like every new company. When it reached the early-growth stage we knew that we had to be a part of it, and that's when we really engaged with Assaf and Elik on a potential investment in their company.
Why did BigPanda partner with Greenfield?
Assaf
You guys had invested the time to get to know us over the years, and I had invested time to get to know you, and that built a relationship of trust. I’ve been around this industry long enough to know that having great investor names are important, but more importantly having specific, great partners who are pleasant, smart people will ultimately help you make good decisions in both the good times, and in the bad times.
My time with [Shay] and Greenfield convinced me that this is someone that would be a good partner throughout the journey. It was really important for me to have a partner that would be with me throughout all four seasons of the VC lifecycle.
Going through the due diligence process with you, we were a very young company scraping by on the initial product-market fit. We hadn’t really thought in a mature way about scaling the organization, ensuring we had the right DNA, SaaS metrics, and overall building out things in a data-driven way.
My interaction with Greenfield and the due diligence process helped me open my eyes and become a lot smarter around how to build a scalable, data-driven company.
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Interested in joining the BigPanda team? Visit our careers page for your next career move: https://greenfield-growth.getro.com/companies/bigpanda
About BigPanda
BigPanda keeps businesses running with AIOps that transform IT data into insight and action. With BigPanda’s AIOps platform, businesses prevent IT outages, improve incident management, and deliver extraordinary customer experiences.
BigPanda’s AIOps Event Correlation and Automation platform helps Fortune 500 enterprises such as Intel, Cisco, United, Abbott, Marriott and Expedia take a giant step towards Autonomous IT Operations. BigPanda is backed by Advent International, Insight Partners, Sequoia Capital, UBS, Wells Fargo, Mayfield, Battery Ventures, Glynn Capital, Greenfield Partners and Pelion. Visit www.bigpanda.io for more information.
