Why do a B Round for Aggregate Knowledge?
Well as reported in a variety of places (here a few of them) Aggregate Knowledge just closed another round of funding. It's a large one and I wanted to take a second to talk about why we decided to do it at this juncture as I've seen a few people comment on it.
When we started Aggregate Knowledge we had a vision and a plan for how we thought the business was going to play out. As in any A round company we made a lot of assumptions about the future. The reality, as people like Josh Kopelman (an investor) have posted about, is that your business plan is never right. We got our fundamentals correct - we had a great product delivering measurable value that customers were willing to pay for.
What we were wrong about was how quickly the market would move. We believed that the market for Discovery services would take until 2008 to truly come to fruition.
The rub is that it moved FASTER than we thought it would. The Discovery market is here NOW.
The number of customers who are interested is much higher than we anticipated and the hunger for a solution is stronger than we imagined.
Yes, we could have held off on raising money and grown more slowly and organically. Ironically, as an entrepreneur its actually more tempting to do that, grow slow and take less dilution. You don't look quite as silly if it doesn't work out for you.
It would be the wrong thing to do though. The Discovery market is maturing quickly and even though we are leading the charge today,if we had to start turning down customers it wouldn't stay that way. We need to ensure that we have the resources to address this market as it grows and keep innovating on the service we provide.
We are the leader in the Discovery Market today and we intend to stay there. I think most would agree that's the best of all reasons to raise more capital.
Chris, you're right, raising this round makes sense for AK in a lot of ways. I wonder what the financing will be primarily used for? More in-depth commentary on my blog at http://foroobar.wordpress.com/2007/04/16/aggregate-knowledge-plans-to-own-discovery/
Posted by: Dead 3.0 | April 16, 2007 at 08:05 PM