Raising Money From 75 Angels: Manmeet Singh, CEO of Dataguise (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Are you selling direct? Are you selling through the channel? How are you going to market?

Manmeet Singh: Since 2013, we have had a direct sale strategy. We have Compuware as a reseller. Our product is available to be downloaded from Hortonworks on Hadoop, which recently went public. People can download and play with the product, but obviously, it will be a direct strategy because Hortonworks doesn’t want to resell our product right now.

Sramana Mitra: So far, you’ve mostly sold direct?

Manmeet Singh: Mostly, it’s direct right now.

Sramana Mitra: Is there anything else in your story that is interesting and worth sharing?

Manmeet Singh: The wonderful thing was that I have more than 70 angels on my investor lists. That was scary for Toba. They were like, “I have never seen a company with 75 angels.” That was a tough job because everybody wanted a question answered. Quite a lot of them were international also.

Sramana Mitra: If you keep growing like this, you’re going to start violating SEC laws.

Manmeet Singh: To violate SEC laws, you have to above 500. Now, the large VCs have taken hold of the company. I don’t think we’re going to run into that problem. That’s a good problem to run into though. That means I’ll have another $35 million.

Sramana Mitra: What may actually be interesting, given that you have this experience and you have already done this mode of fund raising, is that I think in the next few years, crowdfunding is going to become legal. If you need to raise money, you could potentially go out and raise money from 500 angels in a crowdfunding model.

Manmeet Singh: This was crowdfunding.

Sramana Mitra: It is.

Manmeet Singh: Some of the people didn’t even know about database security. They were coming to me because the other guys said, “We are funding Manmeet. Why don’t you fund him?” There are other people in the company who don’t have anything to do with security. A couple of them visited my office just to see if I’m real.

Sramana Mitra: I’m really glad that things worked out and good luck with the next phase of your journey.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Raising Money From 75 Angels: Manmeet Singh, CEO of Dataguise
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