Chicago-based startup Incued is on a laser-focused mission to help founders and investors. Incued is a research-backed, lightweight investor updates platform where you can complete an update in minutes. Founded in 2021 by Josh Furstoss and Ameer Akashe, the company has been growing rapidly. Incued has raised a pre-seed round of $600K to further scale its development. We sat down to chat with Josh Furstoss to learn more.
What was the inspiration behind Incued?
I’ve struggled with this myself, so in many ways it started as a way to solve a problem my friends and I had. As founder I really wanted a centralized location to manage my investor relations that was purpose built for this problem, I wanted a centralized location to see how my business was performing and I wanted it to be as easy as possible so I could answer all my investors questions once instead of getting constant emails and texts asking for info on the company.
As an ex-venture partner I wanted a location where I could see all the information on my portfolio. Sending surveys and emails to founders then storing the information in airtable or excel just wasn’t going to cut it, and hiring more analysts to take on that responsibility full time was out of the question.
Funny enough, HubSpot was my biggest inspiration. I love how it’s self-serve and is easy to use and straightforward, but also powerful. I found so many products on the market are either a single use tool that solves a pinpoint problem or some large expensive enterprise suite. HubSpot hits this sweet spot that I think is truly beautiful.
How does Incued help founders?
We provide all your investor relations needs all in one spot for free. We have a beautifully simple investor update builder, integrated metrics management with the ability to connect to your existing data systems like Quickbooks and a pre-structured data room. For early stage founders sometimes the biggest struggle is knowing how to make an update or knowing what metrics to track or how to properly set up a data room. We make it incredibly simple.
As we grow we will release a premium for founders to help with things like board reporting and even more powerful tools to help CEOs know how their business is doing at a glance and maintain a strong narrative to keep investors excited and involved in the company.
What are some ways investors can leverage Incued for their portfolio companies?
It’s funny, investors have a very similar problem as founders. They need to get data together from the companies to compile into a report for their LPs. The crux of this is that investors need to get the data from the companies and often that’s a lot of work.
Incued lets investors track companies progress, see their investor updates, get the context behind the numbers and why the founders made the decisions they did. Alert to risks and opportunities behind the data as well as enjoy the power of a light-weight data driven investor CRM. If I was to explain to investors in one phrase why incued is amazing I’d simply say “more actionable intelligence, less data entry”
We’ve seen your growth from the early-stage. How’s the traction been so far?
It’s incredible, I’m actually floored. We’ve been working on this for so long and we’ve been testing with many users, but I truly did not expect the traction that flooded in. As I’m writing this I’m smiling watching the slack notifications come through of new accounts being created.
This is a real problem early stage founders have, they don’t talk about it because nobody wants to admit they don’t know how to write world class investor updates or they don’t know how to set up a data room, but based on my linkedin DM’s I can tell you that this is common and widespread.
What advice do you have for founders when it comes to fundraising? What are your biggest mistakes?
Don’t let your ego get in the way, don’t get hung up on valuation. For a while I was so stuck on raising at an uber high valuation that I neglected opportunities. I think about it now in terms of equity allocation, as in “okay we need this much money, I’m willing to sell off 20% of the company for that, will that leave us with enough equity to sell off next round to hit our goals long term.”
Other than that, I think long term personal relationships with investors can go a very long way. You need to genuinely care about the person across the table from you.
Finally, I’ve come to believe that strategic value added from an investor is superior to just getting cash from a big name investor for the brand association. Your investors can often be your biggest cheerleaders, connectors and act as an extension of your sales teams – smaller more motivated VC’s seem to put in more effort and I appreciate that.
Where do you see your industry in the next five years? What trends do you see?
The private markets represent about 53% of the US equities market currently, with the state of liquidity in this market and the lack of IPO’s / late stage M&A troubles I believe that we will move in the direction of finding new forms of liquidity in this market. The private markets are projected to grow to near 60% of the equities market and the number of businesses forming in the US will increase as well. As labor becomes increasingly outsourced and automated, smaller, more agile companies will form and the share of the educated US labor force that is either building companies or deploying capital will increase. I believe that is our role as a developed economy in this world.
Additionally, in the past we say the public markets developed data driven and algorithmic functions more rapidly in the last two decades. It’s very clear this revolution is coming to private markets. “Data Driven VC” has become a popular monicar for people to strive for, but this isn’t just limited to venture capital, but private equity and private lending as well.
I believe this data driven trend in portfolio management will be the core of private markets moving forward and it will be deeply encouraged by the SEC as a way to protect LPs from some of the issues that presented themselves during the zero-interest rate period.
What’s next with Incued?
Build, build, build. Our premium investor side launches at the end of June, new features are coming to the founder side as well. Many new partnerships are launching and we’re currently raising our seed round to expand faster to serve the market need.
I just want founders to be able to have the best experience imaginable. I want to make investor relations easy so founders can focus on building their products and changing the world instead of being distracted by investor emails and texts.
