Hendrik Van Hove, Co-founder of Conveo: BREAKING: Conveo raised $50M Series A

0:00Hello, welcome back to Scaling Europe show. I'm Seb Johnson. Today on the show, we've got Hendrik. Hendrik is one of the co-founders of Conveo, who has just announced some very exciting news. Tell me what's going on.

0:09Hendrik Van Hove:Hey Seb. So yeah, exciting news for European tech company. We just raised a$50 million Series A. So large to any standards, especially in Europe. And yeah, couldn't be more excited about it. Amazing. Who's getting on board? Who's leading the round and who's contributing? So it's led by DST Global and then we have Balderton and Visionaries. So Global Fund, European Funds. It's great to work with people with the same ambition, but also the cultural backgrounds. Everything just clicks faster. So yeah, really happy with the partners we chose. We had quite a few options. So yeah, this is a partnership set we're happy about.

0:48How come? How did you choose? I mean, it's always great to have like a nice hot round where you get to choose. What about these partners appeal to you?

0:56Hendrik Van Hove:Yeah, I think Visionaries is a newer fund. So they hustle quite hard. We had a great click with them. They really went above and beyond. And a ton of introductions since around. So that's really the personal click, the hustle. And Balderton, European fund with a lot of great companies. Back to have a great relationship with the partners there. Also did a ton of intros. There was also really a personal click. very much a lot of experience in enterprise sales which is really what we do so there was a very conscious choice there and then yeah dst global is just uh yeah a dream anchor uh fun for us to work with we had multiple ceos of some of the most well-known companies reach out to us and specifically tell us to work with dst global and partner tom stafford there so yeah it's like by find the references by expertise industry fits and then just personal click amazing well it's a stacked cap table but for those who don't know maybe give a quick intro what have you built and what problems are you solving for your customers so conveyor builds consumer understanding infrastructure for the fortune 2000 basically for them to drive growth and margin they need to do the best possible marketing develop the best products sales strategies and sometimes acquire other brands and all of these teams they made their decisions based on consumer understanding but today it's extremely lackluster projects are slow data collection is hard then once the data is collected it's extremely manual to get insights from it distribute it etc and so the whole thing is backwards we start from thinking okay what does marketing need to build the best campaigns what does product need to be to build the best product and we were backwards from there saying okay what is the data they need how can we agentically service it to them to really drive growth throughout the enterprise amazing where did this come from you know why was this a problem that you decided to solve so i worked at mckinsey for a year absolutely loved it and there i did a ton of consumer research myself so surveys interviews b2b b2c and you could just see that it was a very manual process but it was extremely valuable clients paid a ton for it and so then when AI came out, we started building an AI moderator around the kitchen table for a few months, then got into Y Combinator.

3:18Hendrik Van Hove:But then it was really by spending time with our customers like Google, Unilever, that it became clear, all right, if we zoom out, why are we doing consumer research? It's to drive growth. And you do that again through brand, product, and these other verticals. And the whole process, again, from data collection, we focused on data collection initially, but data collection is just the first step and so once we zoomed out and looked at the full problem from data collection to decision that's when we got really excited and yeah sharing that vision with uh with our with our vcs now there was when it clicked for them like oh this is a much bigger problem than just consumer research and making that more efficient amazing and you know i read that you're scaling pretty rapidly can you share some information on like the types of customers who are using your product and how many you have?

4:10Hendrik Van Hove:Yeah, so as a European, it's going beyond my original estimation. So we're really working with B2C companies across technology, pharma, travel, CPG is a very large industry, gambling and anything in between. So B2C companies in the Fortune 2000s really are our target customer. And then, yeah, some key milestones are working with Google, multimillion dollar project, same with Unilever, across the different teams from the channel teams that go to market teams, the marketing departments and product. And yeah, there's a lot we can share because by the nature of it, consumer research involves new products, new campaigns, etc.

4:56Hendrik Van Hove:But yeah, there's been some cool product developments where we were at the origin of. That's amazing. And you've got this amazing captain of the phenomenal investors that are backing you. When you were out raising that round, what was it that you think really got them excited? Was it, you know, a certain level of commercial traction? Was it the team that you built? I know you were a very research heavy team. Was it the product and customer feedback? Was it something in particular that really got the investors excited? Yeah, so I think the thing that immediately jumps to mind is my co-founder and CEO, Dieter.

5:32Hendrik Van Hove:He built datacam.com before and scaled it significantly as CTO. So you have a technical product CEO who can scale platforms, can scale engineering teams. And so, yeah, that was a very big one. I was really the subject matter expert from having done the research myself. we also have an industry veteran so the team fit with the problem was exceptional and the technical ability was there so yeah especially in the series a a lot of it is still a founder bet and a team fit but then second we had some competitors in the space that have been added for one year two years longer than us backed by top vcs as well from silicon valley and yeah they actually had some significant customer churn to us in the months leading up to our rounds.

6:23Hendrik Van Hove:And those customers were more than happy to do reference calls during the round. And so that's really when the dominoes started to fall. The key customer there was Canva. What an amazing company, what an amazing brand. And they churned to us after a competitive RFP and a proper process. And there were quite a few other ones. And so I think those two factors, the customer churn to us, the fast growth and then the team, that's really what drove it. That's amazing. Can I ask, what is it that you're doing so much better, you think? Yeah, I think if you zoom out on a high level, a lot of companies sell AI tools to do a bit faster what you're doing today.

7:03Hendrik Van Hove:But the change within these enterprises to really leverage AI is so big. Imagine you used to have a marketing team and an insights team. The marketing team got a signal from the market, an idea. they sent a brief to the insights team insights team does a project for a month two months and comes back now all of a sudden with AI the insights team can do a hundred projects can proactively deliver these ideas to the marketing team and the marketing team all of a sudden is from a proactive position into a reactive position they get the insights and they have a hundred times more opportunities to act on and so if you just sell a tool the research team can run one project faster but for a company like canva or these enterprises who truly use ai they need a partner that doesn't only provide the technology but that also provides support in the change management training how can we truly redesign first principles how you can drive most value to your customers and so i think the thing we got that others don't is like for an enterprise to truly leverage ai it's ai plus people because there's so much change involved to truly get the value oh amazing well it sounds like you guys are crushing it um you've just doing so as well that's amazing where are you based right at the moment where's your geographic split so we have an office in san francisco new york london and europe our engineering team is mostly in europe and then our go-to-market teams are spread all over i just moved to new york um two weeks ago and yeah i've been meeting customers every day here it's just for go-to market you really need to be where your customers are how are you finding it the move to new york yeah it's incredible you i mean something as silly as posting a linkedin post and before you know it you have 10 coffee chats planned with potential customer it's investors we made a few hires in less than 10 days just because you get introduced to people.

9:06Hendrik Van Hove:And so I would say that the momentum you can capture here is very high. So for European companies, I would say, yeah, have an office in the US sooner rather than later. But there's still a tremendous amount of value of having your engineering team in Europe. Being at both sides of the pond is extremely valuable. I wouldn't do it any other way. And what about New York versus San Francisco? Is there like a given there's a better hub to be in? Yeah, I think so our customers are the Fortune 2000, right? Across all of these old industries. Tech is also, it happens to be our largest industry vertical.

9:49Hendrik Van Hove:But yeah, I think sometimes there's a bit too much navel gazing in Silicon Valley. If you talk to people in the enterprise, like they're typically still Microsoft co-pilots. They haven't been as AI built necessarily. There's a lot of SF companies, they talk about like replace people with AI, et cetera. And so I think there's actually value in terms of not being in the SF tech bubble, being more in the traditional world, especially if you sell human to human still. I think there's a tremendous amount of value to truly have empathy. Amazing. And how you, it's interesting because a lot of what you're doing is almost like helping customers decide how what to build how to market their product how do you do that yourselves are you using your own product and your customers like how does that work yeah so we do both we still believe incredibly deeply in human to human relations and so we spend a ton of time with our customers face to face i love nothing more than a good whiteboard session because we're evolving we're solving new like we're kind of co-building what an agentic enterprise looks like especially a people first agentic enterprise so that's something you have to go on a four hour session for so that's awesome and then we also do interview a ton of our target customers even in our hiring process with our own platform and so I think that's also what I always say to our enterprises when they work with us you should think of Conveo as enabling you what you could never do before in terms of doing consumer research or AI video interviewing hundreds of people overnight all over the world in any language.

11:35Hendrik Van Hove:Most of the use cases that we support in the enterprise is research that wouldn't happen otherwise or that would have been a survey and we rarely replace one-on-one conversations. So I think that's an important thing like AI raises the floor rather than replacing fully the human-to-human aspect that was already there before. That's so interesting. And has that approach changed at all since you started? Have you kind of made mistakes on the way where you think, actually, this is where the human still needs to be, this is where AI can add value? Yeah, so originally, in terms of us selling our product and how our customers use it, we really pitched more, okay, you can now do automated focus groups, you can talk to more people one-on-one.

12:23Hendrik Van Hove:But we were actually surprised by our early customers like Unilever saying like, okay, no, we do a lot more research that we wouldn't have done before. And they're actually replacing more surveys with our platform versus focus groups. And so the aspect of just running more research to make your decisions better was incredibly powerful. But then what we saw is a lot of marketeers started getting onboarded on the platform, product people, people from R &D, the strategy team, even the M &A team, corporate development, and they started talking to all of the data and really using it to solve their strategic questions day to day.

13:03Hendrik Van Hove:And so that's when we saw, okay, the queries that a lot of these teams do when we talk to them are sometimes similar, right? So what if we start from those business problems and we see the data as just an input to making those decisions as well as possible across these different functions and that's really when we were like okay it's beyond our original proposal these enterprises need consumer understanding infrastructure and that's what we're going to build as a company was there a moment where everything clicked and i guess you went from sort of trying to figure it out trying to find product market fit to all of a sudden okay like we we this is it we've got something now yeah i think there were two of those click moments so first um we got into y combinator and during the batch we had four enterprise customers who each signed for 25k among them was unilever 1414 foods uh jdp it's a couple other ones that were smaller as well and so we didn't necessarily get a massive influx in terms of the number of customers but we had our revenue but our usage statistics really picked up and so that was really awesome to see that people uh like ran studies on a repeat basis but they then actually went back to the data a lot more than they previously would have and so that was really for us like okay our core value prop here there's something and we're gonna go for it and that's when we raise our seat but then spending time with our customers on the ground for days for weeks literally sitting next to them just having conversations and them talking about how their work as an insights function powers marketing powers products powers these strategy decisions and then talking to those teams and the issues they they face together that's really when it kicked like okay these enterprises for them to be successful they need to understand the consumer as deeply as possible to gain market share, to drive revenue, to drive margin.

15:09Hendrik Van Hove:And it's not only, again, the data collection, it's about truly the whole infrastructure around it and making sure the right person gets the right data delivered to make the right decision. And so, yeah, that happened over months, but then all of a sudden it became so clear. And that's really when we went out, did the A, and yeah, got a lot of buy-in into that vision. how did you secure some of those enterprise like unilever is like a absolutely massive company right like how are you able to secure such a large enterprise client so early on in the journey so a lot of it was through selling the vision let's be honest right a lot of it was also through initial personal network just true hustle i always tell i have a lot of european founders and friends who want to start a company and they like start overthinking everything and i just say get to the first five customers ask your network ask if you can go there face to face don't do half hour zoom call go face to face spend days with them and just build your platform together with them and from there on out once a few customers love you then you can scale and so i think that strategy also worked super well for us one interesting thing that goes against the grain of typical recommendations is we went enterprise first because the enterprises are actually often looking for solutions.

16:33Hendrik Van Hove:They're large enough to have people dedicated to find AI solutions. And we found it, we're very happy with that choice to go enterprise first immediately and then go down market later. Yeah, that's really interesting. And do you see a large, a large market opportunity lower down the market? Do you think there is that large, I don't know, potential with SMBs? Do you think you'll stay enterprise focused? So we're really hyper enterprise focused, Fortune 2000 and above. I think the reason is that the problem we're solving in consumer understanding infrastructure, making sure one insight gets routed to the right people, that problem really becomes big once you're in an enterprise.

17:15Hendrik Van Hove:I always like to give this example where imagine a team in Brazil and in Europe, they both do research on packaging. And they see that the color black is associated with protein in foods and with premium in beauty care. Those insights should be routed to any marketing team over the world in that organization across all of these different categories that they have. It should be routed to the R &D team because those insights, yeah, they might drive margin. They might drive more consumers buying those products because you position it well compared to what they already know. And so the larger the enterprise, the larger the opportunity, the value is.

17:59Hendrik Van Hove:There's other companies that also do AI moderation and they're really going down markets. I think that's a very valuable play as well. But yeah, that's not where we see the future of our company. Yeah, super interesting. And you've got this money now. You've raised, you know, I think 10x what you raised your previous round. What are you going to do with it? How are you thinking about making the most of this money and getting you to that next stage of your journey? Yes, we're already aggressively deploying it. We scale our company from 12 people to 80 people over the past six to nine months. Wow.

18:35Hendrik Van Hove:Yeah, it's incredible. And I'll tell you as a founder, I was only an IC at McKinsey for a year, but then now managing such a team comes with its challenges. But it's going very well and we're going to keep the growth up. So we're scaling across San Francisco, New York, London, Belgium, hiring more engineers, hiring more salespeople, scaling our marketing and just delivering more value to our customers. It's all about how much value you can deliver, the relationships you can build and inventing the future of enterprise AI. That's amazing. Where do you think growth is going to come from? Do you think there's a big market?

19:14Are you seeing pulls already from either new industries or new regions?

19:21Hendrik Van Hove:So, yeah, more than half our revenue is already from the US and it's been so for quite a while. I'm also very happy that we have a very broad industry split, basically any B2C industry from travel to pharma to CPG and tech, anything in between. So in terms of opportunities, it's always been quite broad and we keep seeing those trends. I think one thing we're seeing is as we expand the scope of our products and deepening the relationship selling more into C-suite and executives, the ACV we're seeing is just going 10x, 20x. And so a lot of growth is really from doing larger deals selling across the enterprise.

20:05Hendrik Van Hove:Imagine originally our main value prop was, okay, you can do one piece of research better, cheaper, faster. and now we're really going to enterprises and saying okay what if any type of data stream you have any research you do either with Conveyor or not it gets agentically routed to the right person whether it's marketing for product XYZ in this region the sales team whatever all of a sudden you're talking about an enterprise wide infrastructure platform and that's truly what the C-Suite cares about because that's what they've always been missing they only got insights delivered in a powerpoint but every decision is made based on how well you understand your consumer and so for us all the growth again it's linked to the value delivery and the value delivery is just enterprise-wide yeah it's so interesting it's like a classic like wedge you know you get in with like a particular product or pain point you're selling but actually the value is and the market size probably is so much bigger than you would think the market size would be right because you are you're it's not just about like research and data it's like actually making your business access this data and the decision making from left to right top to bottom exactly i think if you think about it from a value perspective to a customer to an enterprise running the research is a small but a super important part of the value chain of making that decision but then it has to be packaged to an insight that insight serves one decision.

21:40Hendrik Van Hove:That decision might be a marketing campaign, a product launch, etc. The research industry today is very much focused on getting the data and delivering that data to the initial research stakeholders so they can take it further internally within the organization. But similar to a CRM, where originally it happened on paper, on lists, we think there's going to be a new industry, consumer understanding infrastructure. same as an ERP system it's going to be as critical as an ERP it's going to be as critical as a CRM and I think the value of that pie is going to be more than 10x the research industry today and I think that's just an incredibly exciting problem to work on if we can make it easier or if we can make enterprises deliver better marketing campaigns better products and help them get the products in the right hands I think we're truly making the world better because you're just solving an information symmetry and delivering consumer surplus to everyone.

22:40Hendrik Van Hove:So I think it's a fascinating problem to work on. And it's amazing because to your point, it's like people often think about AI as just about cheaper or faster. And it's like, this is the real value is not actually cost and speed. It's like, actually, this is a real competitor advantage that you use insights and information to build the best product or market. it's a very different thing to like oh just cut costs exactly i love that framing so much i was talking to a cmo of a top five global pharma company literally two hours ago and like their team got the mandate of saying okay you need to cut cost by 10 30 with ai right on their research budget but if you think about it you can cut costs of a relatively small budget within an organization, but the insights they deliver, they drive how you generate market share, how you drive your margin, how you protect your brand or build your brand, etc.

23:41Hendrik Van Hove:So the savings you can achieve with AI are not even a hundred as much as the revenue you can drive or the margin you can drive by actually using those insights across your brands. And so to me, it's all about value, but how we go to market and how we partner with enterprises, we say, okay, we're first going to deliver efficiency because that's the mandate everyone has initially. There's no use in fighting that. Start with efficiency. And then once you reach efficiency, faster time to insight, better distribution, you choose a use case where you say, okay, we're going to attack this together to deliver more value.

24:22Hendrik Van Hove:And then you say, okay, this use case is successful. Now we're going to scale it throughout your enterprise. And that's how you really deliver value for the most important brands in the world. And like each and every single one of those journeys starts somewhere else because every industry, every enterprise is in a different AI adoption point or every ambition of the C-Street, the ambition level differs a lot. But it's such a joy to embark on that journey together. You're solving tough problems together with clients and technology and people and change management. I truly love it, seriously. me.

24:58That's amazing. Well, I feel like that's a good place to stop. That's amazing. I feel like I'm convinced. I feel like this is an amazing problem at a huge, huge market size. These are the most interesting companies in AI, I think, when you are growing a new category. You're not competing for existing market share. You're not even competing for headcount reduction. It's like, actually, we're building tools that can enable competitive advantage. Well, Hendrik, massive congratulations, and thank you for joining me.

25:24Hendrik Van Hove:only just getting started a lot of work ahead of us