Sam Bisbee is a Venture Partner at F-Prime with a background in technology, cybersecurity, and operations. He is also the Chief Security Officer at Threat Stack where he’s responsible for the company’s security and compliance programs, in addition to providing security services to Threat Stack’s Cloud SecOps Program customers.
Sam joined Threat Stack in 2014 to build and help bring the product to market. Previously Sam was a member of the Cloudant team (acquired by IBM).
Sandor is a Venture Partner at F-Prime, focusing on enterprise technology and cybersecurity. Previously he served as the CTO of LogMeIn where he drove the technology vision and development of the Identity and Remote Management portfolio (LastPass, LogMeIn Central, LogMeIn Pro, and GoToMyPC) and led the corporate IT and Security teams, navigating through many acquisitions and the merger with Citrix Online.
Sandor earned his master’s degree in Computer Science at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics and spent the early part of his career at Digital Equipment.
RiskLens is the leading provider of quantitative cyber risk management software. Its platform is recognized as a mission-critical business application for cybersecurity and risk teams across the Fortune 1,000. RiskLens empowers large enterprises and government organizations to manage cyber risk from the business perspective by quantifying that risk in monetary terms. Clients depend on RiskLens solutions to better understand and communicate their cyber risk exposure in financial terms, prioritize their risk mitigations, measure the ROI of their security investments, and meet regulatory demands calling for the quantification of cyber risk. RiskLens is the only cyber risk quantification software purpose-built on FAIR, the standard quantification model for information security and operational risk. RiskLens was acquired by Safe Security in 2023.
Unbxd applies artificial intelligence and advanced data sciences to connect e-commerce shoppers to the products they are most likely to buy. Unbxd was acquired by Netcore Cloud in 2022.
An Eight Roads investment. Eight Roads is F-Prime’s sister venture capital investment group, with which F-Prime collaborates on investments outside of the Americas and Europe.
Mineral Tree provides accounts payable automation software for finance professionals at growing organizations. Mineral Tree was acquired by Global Payments in 2021.
An Eight Roads investment. Eight Roads is F-Prime’s sister venture capital investment group, with which F-Prime collaborates on investments outside of the Americas and Europe.
* Denotes activity with the non-F-Prime investment team.
Securonix is working to radically transform all areas of data security with actionable security intelligence. Their purpose-built, advanced security analytics technology mines, enriches, analyzes, scores and visualizes customer data into actionable intelligence on the highest risk threats from within and outside their environment. Using signature-less anomaly detection techniques that track users, account and system behavior, Securonix is able to detect the most advanced insider threats, data security and fraud attacks automatically and accurately.
An Eight Roads investment. Eight Roads is F-Prime’s sister venture capital investment group, with which F-Prime collaborates on investments outside of the Americas and Europe.
* Denotes activity with the non-F-Prime investment team.
Icertis, the leading enterprise contract management platform in the cloud, solves the hardest contract management problems on the easiest to use platform. With Icertis, companies accelerate their business by increasing contract velocity, protect against risk by ensuring regulatory and policy compliance, and optimize their commercial relationships by maximizing revenue and reducing costs.
An Eight Roads investment. Eight Roads is F-Prime’s sister venture capital investment group, with which F-Prime collaborates on investments outside of the Americas and Europe.
Enterprise SaaS has been a prolific sector for start-up creation over the last decade. Billions of dollars invested, and billions of dollars returned to investors and employees. Notably, almost all in the US. However, enterprise SaaS is becoming a global opportunity, both in terms of target markets and company creation. Through our investments teams across the globe, F-Prime and EightRoads are in the unique position of being at the forefront of investing in these global enterprise SaaS opportunities. We are excited to announce our most recent joint investment in Whatfix, a company we believe can become the next great global SaaS company.
The Whatfix Digital Adoption Platform
Whatfix, a company started in Bangalore, India, is helping define a new class of software user experience for customers across the globe. Historically, software user experience was mostly an afterthought; when the alternative is paper and pencil or spreadsheets, the bar for delivering a high-quality user experience is low. However, as spend on software by enterprises has increased, and the software is increasingly a key driver of operational excellence, there is an acute need to find better ways to drive digital adoption and to ensure employees are deriving full value from the software. Legacy approaches of off-line training, support desks, and help documentation were never very effective, and the ‘consumerization of IT’ means today’s employees expect software to be intuitive to use.
Whatfix helps solve the digital adoption challenge with their contextual, in-app support tools. Across any enterprise application, Whatfix’s product suite enables delivery of support at the exact time the user needs it and at the precise place in the application where it is needed. The support can also be personalized to the user’s past behavior (e.g., first time user) or to their role in the organization. In addition, product usage analytics enable Whatfix to help identify the most commonly used features and the most commonly faced issues to enable further improvement of business processes. Through this suite of capabilities, hundreds of Whatfix customers are already seeing significant uplift of employee engagement across their key enterprise software tools, including Salesforce, Oracle, and Workday.
One of the most interesting aspects of Whatfix’s product is they collect robust usage data across a suite of enterprise applications. Looking ahead, they expect to leverage this unique data asset to provide predictive support, anticipating challenges employees will face, and to automate much of the tedious work of accessing and maintaining data across these applications.
Building a global product business out of India
Whatfix is a true pioneer of the next generation of global enterprise SaaS companies from India. While the technical talent from India has always been world-class, building global product businesses has been a longer journey. However, the last several years has seen the emergence of several significant success stories, such as Freshworks and Druva. Given the best-in-class SaaS growth metrics and unit economics that Whatfix already enjoys, we believe they are well on their way to joining this elite group.
The path Whatfix founders, Khadim and Vara, took to build the company is one we hope many future entrepreneurs from India can learn from. Here are a few of the key decisions they’ve made:
Rapid product iteration and customer feedback: Khadim and Vara have personally spent significant time with their global customers to get feedback on early versions of the product and to ensure product market fit at every step of the product lifecycle
Hiring entrepreneurial leaders: recognizing the lack of experienced hires in India who have built global SaaS businesses, they prioritized hiring leaders with entrepreneurial experience, who bring not only a deep sense of ownership to their roles, but also a willingness to learn and innovate best practices
Building a low-cost inside sales team in India: capitalizing on the increased willingness of enterprises to buy products through an inside sales-led approach, Whatfix has continuously optimized the sales hiring profile, sales pitch, and lead nurturing process to successfully sell high five-figure and even six-figure deals out of India. This has been a critical stepping stone to eventually building a high-impact field sales team in the US
Setting up in the US in the early days of the company: early in the life of the company, once they validated product market fit, Vara relocated to the US and Vispi, an early investor, joined as head of sales, based in the US. Investing early in being close to the customer not only helped build credibility for the company with international customers, but it also tightened the cycle of product feedback
Continuously learning: Khadim and Vara have been true students of building a global start-up, proactively finding mentors amongst many of the leading SaaS entrepreneurs in India and also seeking out guidance from experienced global executives across every functional area
Whatfix is a remarkable company, both in terms of the value they bring to their clients and in their ability to chart their own path to building a global company. We are fortunate to be investors, and we are excited to partner with Khadim and Vara on the next leg of their journey!
Percy is a visual testing platform that automates the detection of UI changes by capturing screenshots, comparing them against baselines, and highlighting visual differences. Integrated into CI/CD workflows, Percy supports cross-browser and responsive testing, enabling teams to identify visual regressions early in the development process. Its AI-powered visual engine reduces false positives and streamlines the review process, facilitating faster and more confident releases.
Whatfix is a leading digital guidance and engagement platform that helps companies provide intuitive onboarding, and effective training and support. Whatfix’s contextual and personalized in-app content drives-up user productivity and engagement.