LeadGenius Leading the Way in the Hot Sales and Marketing Tech Space

Where it all Began

LeadGenius was established in 2011 in the computer science department at UC Berkeley, California. 

A team of Ph.D. students developed a mobile application that allowed people around the world to perform data aggregation on the open web. Its vision for leveraging a global network of human intelligence through mobile devices was combined with a social mission—to use a distributed network of underutilized talent and match it to the demands of businesses everywhere, producing fair wages for those most in need.

Using a combination of artificial intelligence and human computation to identify targeted sales leads, LeadGenius built proprietary custom data sets to help global go-to-market teams target their audiences more effectively. 

LeadGenius’ Growth Journey

Mark Godley joined the company as CEO after its Series B round in 2017. He applied his 30 years of SaaS growth expertise—including 20 years in the sales and marketing technology space—to take the company to the next level.

One of the first changes Mark made was to refocus the company on a different target market. Since LeadGenius was born in Y Combinator, it was attracted to selling to other startups. However, the sophistication of LeadGenius’ technology was much better suited to larger enterprises like Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and other global multinationals — all of whom are LeadGenius customers today.

Mark also began to transition LeadGenius from being a manual, service-heavy organization to being a true SaaS business. The team embarked on a multi-year software development process to automate many manual activities that could help the company grow effectively. As a result of these efforts, LeadGenius could shift its global workforce to higher-value data building tasks—while increasing customer capacity at the same time.

With these key strategic changes completed, Mark turned his attention to its funding model. He sought a non-dilutive funding methodology that would scale with the business as it grows.

Growth Capital

LeadGenius had some venture debt in the business, in addition to venture capital. However, the traditional debt model was proving ineffective for LeadGenius. The principal payments affected the working capital in the business, ultimately stifling growth.

Mark employed a debt broker called Spinta Capital to help him weigh up his options. Spinta introduced Mark to TIMIA Capital, and he immediately felt that TIMIA’s growth capital aligned better with his business goals.

“The minute I found TIMIA, I felt like I found my tribe. From the language on the website, to the technology-driven application process and how I interacted with the team, it was obvious that TIMIA was a different animal. I really appreciated TIMIA’s software-centric, modern way of doing business,” said Mark.

Deploying Capital to Fuel Growth

LeadGenius’ latest product Flow is a cross-functional tool used by sales, marketing, and/or customer success teams to automate manual data-related tasks. Because several teams can utilize it for different use cases, Flow is a heavily and widely used end-user application that presents an excellent opportunity for LeadGenius to grow and evolve its traditional business.

“Data is the fuel of our economy. Our mission is to help companies have a competitive advantage in their data acquisition methodology for their sales and marketing teams,” said Mark.

In under a year, Flow has been adopted by approximately 900 users—six times the number of users of LeadGenius’s enterprise application. In addition, the company recently signed a deal to onboard over 1,000 users from a single company—and it has the capacity to do that due to the nature of its new SaaS product.

LeadGenius will use TIMIA’s investment facility to add new layers of support, QA, release, and development support to fuel this growth.

“While customer success hires will play a role, we really want our software to be the retention vehicle,” said Mark.

What Does the Future Look Like?

LeadGenius is focused on remaining cash flow positive and growing organically in the short term. 

“TIMIA wants us to have access to capital to accelerate growth and they’re not afraid of our cash burn. We have this strange role reversal whereby TIMIA’s covenants are very generous and I’m pushing back saying I don’t want to spend a lot of money,” said Mark.

Mark is pleased to have the availability to deploy more capital conservatively when the time is right.

“TIMIA was very transparent and quantitative in its methodology. That gave me confidence that as I grow the business, I’ll have access to more capital,” said Mark

The sales and marketing technology space is very hot and LeadGenius is in a great position to capitalize on the growth. We look forward to seeing where they go next.

LeadGenius Team

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