Building a Global Enterprise Software Company from Belgium: Felix Van de Maele, CEO of Collibra (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Your positioning is to help with data consistency.

Felix Van de Maele: Yes, data consistency, data understanding, and data compliance.

Sramana Mitra: Who is your direct competitor?

Felix Van de Maele: The biggest competitor is really doing nothing. It’s not a replacement sale. What we replace is Excel, SharePoint, and Word. It’s a new category. It’s not really a new problem, but the problem just became too big to handle on an ad hoc basis. As to who we compete with, I’d say the incumbent data management companies like IBM and Informatica are the ones we compete with the most, because they’ve been selling data management platforms for a long time. We don’t say to our prospects that they are competition but we really believe that they are doing something else.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back a little bit, chronologically, through your process. We were in year three. In that year, you hit $1 million in revenue?

Felix Van de Maele: Probably year four. Year three was around $500,000.

Sramana Mitra: In year four, you hit $1 million and you were already selling to the US. You were successful in selling to the US without having a US operation.

Felix Van de Maele: Yes. We went to events. We stayed one week before and one week after the event. That’s how we closed customers.

Sramana Mitra: You said you did $4 million in year five.

Felix Van de Maele: That’s correct.

Sramana Mitra: And $20 million in year six?

Felix Van de Maele: $12 million.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a little about how the customer acquisition moved in that period going from $1 million to $4 million to $12 million. What did you do to manage that growth and acquire customers?

Felix Van de Maele: Benny came on board and we had one more person doing pre-sales. We did everything ourselves. It’s a typical enterprise sales cycle. It takes a long time. The good thing is that the deal sizes can be significant. We saw the deal size increase from $30,000 to $150,000. I remember one time very well when we sent a proposal for a million dollar deal, they laughed at us.

But then in year four or five, we actually did our first million dollar deal with a big insurance company in the states, which I think was really big milestone for us. We started to see the deal sizes grow really quickly. In year five, one of the founders moved to the US full-time, which was a hard thing to do with a very limited budget. He moved full-time and we hired our first two sales people in the US. It was in 2014. Then we started to close more deals and slowly grow the sales team.

Sramana Mitra: Year five is 2011?

Felix Van de Maele: Year five is 2014. We raised a Series A round in 2012. It was not much – about €1 million. From that point, we started to grow more quickly.

Sramana Mitra: You raised a venture round in 2014?

Felix Van de Maele: We raised a seed round in 2008 right when we got started. Then we raised a Series A round in 2012. Then we raised a Series B in 2015.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Building a Global Enterprise Software Company from Belgium: Felix Van de Maele, CEO of Collibra
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