Necessity, the old proverb says, is the mother of invention. For two Atlanta entrepreneurs, necessity came after accidentally wiping out an entire year’s worth of work with one click.
Brad Smith, a “non-engineer”, met Jack McGlinchey, a product manager, at another Atlanta-based startup. “The two often riffed on the problem caused by too many platforms that didn’t speak to one another. At one point, it became more than a riff; it was a debilitating problem. While Brad managed a complex tech stack at the office — Salesforce, Marketo, Hubspot, and more — he accidentally wiped out an entire year’s worth of documented revenue with the click of a button,” the Sonar team told Hypepotamus. “The mishap took the company offline for two days, cost the company over $100K, and kept deals from closing. In the aftermath, a couple of things happened: Brad realized he had no idea how it happened, and that he needed Jack to help find a way to never, ever do it again.”
The result was the basis for Sonar, a SaaS company designed to help manage and navigate a growing tech stack. Defining what they are calling the “Change Intelligence” category, operations, revenue, and systems teams alike have access to what tech stacks are driving go-to-market strategies.
The team announced it has raised a $12 million Series A round, from San Francisco-based Craft Ventures, Slack, Valor EP, and Parade VC. Atlanta’s own Kyle Porter, co-founder and CEO of SalesLoft, also joined the round as an angel investor.
To date, Sonar has brought in customers like Raleigh-based Pendo, Drift, Outreach, Carta, and OneLogin.
Change Intelligence in a Changing Tech Landscape
The Sonar team told Hypepotamus that they’ve increased both customer count and revenue by 10x since March 2020. They’ve also grown the team from 3 employees to 25, with plans to triple with the new Series A capital.
Sethen Maleno has joined as the VP of Engineering, Christine Ladd has taken on the role of Head of Marketing, and Danny Garcia will join as Director of Sales in April 2021.
“The product has transformed to solve more of our customers’ pain points and help them accelerate change management in their business,” the team added. “We recently released proactive issue monitoring, detailed historical change timelines, and a Salesforce overlay through our Chrome extension. We’re also rethinking how our customers manage ongoing process changes and plan to release new functionality to help our users document context around the technology changes they’re coordinating with Sonar.”
The team added that it will continue to grow and support the Slack-based community Wizard of Ops, which Smith founded to connect those working in the operations and technology space.
