The right team…
We first heard about PacketAI after Abdel and Hardik were awarded the “Digital Start-up Trophy” by IMT Starter, an incubator based in Paris. We then followed their progress and stayed in touch throughout their journey with Entrepreneur First. Although very young, we like that Abdel and Hardik are two complementary founding team members. Abdel brings solid technical expertise and a clear vision on how to deliver performance, while Hardik brings customer and product-centric thinking to the table. In addition to their complementary skills, the two have demonstrated their ability to quickly adapt to complex B2B processes and sales cycles, laying the right agile foundations for success.
At the right time…
We believe that now is the perfect time to start and scale a pioneering company in the IT Operations Management (ITOM) market. The industry already benefits from first generation IT tools such as Splunk or Elastic Stack to monitor and analyze IT data, now giving ground to more sophisticated and powerful AI-based products.
Corporates are in the midst of digital transformation, and their IT teams are under growing pressure to integrate new technologies while reliably operating existing – and highly complex – systems. As a result, market interest for innovative ITOM solutions is at its highest.
PacketAI’s solution accurately predicts IT incidents and helps IT teams anticipate them before they occur, separating PacketAI from any other existing tool’s purely reactive nature. We believe that PacketAI will give IT teams the resources they need to accelerate their digital transformation processes and enable them to move from constant firefighting to prevention.
With the right market approach!
PacketAI’s traction confirms the current market appetite for such a solution. In a market traditionally plagued by long sales cycles, the team has already aroused a strong interest from first prospects. By the time we closed the round, we even saw the team sign its first contracts, putting the company in a very different position than when we first met.
Moving forward
For now, we believe that the team has everything it takes to succeed. Yet many challenges lie ahead.
We don’t intend to invest in an opportunity that requires waiting for a team to build a technical product to start thinking about the selling – a mistake most of the Deep Tech startups we come across make. Instead, we view UX design and product-market fit as the crucial next steps to increase PacketAI’s stickiness.
On the short term, we believe PacketAI’s unique technology stack will gauge market interest and that it is differentiated and critical enough to become the backbone for IT teams. However, the company’s long-term success rests on achieving a perfect product-market fit and creating a solid marketing strategy.