The global low-code development market was valued at around $10B last year, but that figure is expected to soar to $187B within a decade as the industry grows.
Next Matter, the category-defining end-to-end operations automation platform, has raised $16M in a Series A fundraising round led by OMERS Ventures. Previous investors BlueYard Capital and Crane Venture Partners, as well as a number of high-profile angel investors, including Raisin founders Frank Freund and Tamaz Georgadze, HeyJobs founder Marius Luther, and Charles Songhurst, participated in the investment round.
With the fundraise, the company plans to grow its entirely remote staff from 15 to 75 people, with a special focus on the United States, where a third of its clients are currently located.
Next Matter’s growth
Since the product’s official launch last year, the Berlin-based firm has grown by 25% month over month, with monthly active users increasing by 344 percent quarter over quarter. Among the platform’s growing user base are stock trading platform Trade Republic, US ecommerce growth solution Spreetail, insurtech major Wefox, and US car marketplace leader Shift.com.
Jan Hugenroth founded Next Matter in Berlin in 2018 as a new purpose-built cloud platform for operations. Before founding Next Matter, Hugenroth worked as an operator and advised operations teams at global consultancy company McKinsey for almost a decade. Hugenroth saw that the organisations he was working with were compelled to conduct operations across business departments using a patchwork of spreadsheets, email, and chat platforms that were too general purpose and not developed with operations in mind. Similarly, even as businesses grew, they were forced to rely on custom code and bespoke tools, both of which are disproportionately expensive to develop and maintain.
Hugenroth recognised the need for a cloud-based universal platform with a modular foundation that could be adjusted to each customer’s specific operational requirements. Following a series of successful pilots, Next Matter formally launched in 2021.
How does it function?
Next Matter provides an operating system that connects a company’s activities across departments by orchestrating important workflow across all departments. Next Matter brings people and their tools together regardless of their function in the organisation by integrating with a firm’s existing tech stack, such as HubSpot, Slack, and Zapier. Users may automate and orchestrate any situation imaginable using the platform’s drag-and-drop interface, either from scratch or using Next Matter’s huge collection of best practice operations templates.
Next Matter onboarding process will include a launch meeting with a Next Matter team member within days of signing up, who are all former operations consultants, to customise the platform to their particular needs and help create their operations processes from the bottom up or based on best practices templates. The Next Matter team will then schedule regular check-in meetings with a new customer to ensure that they are getting the most out of the platform.
Jan Hugenroth, Founder of Next Matter said, “Ever since my days as a consultant, I’ve been aware that operational excellence can make or break a business. But there has been a sustained lack of innovation taking place in the operations space, with companies forced to put together patchwork solutions that leave much to be desired. That’s why we built Next Matter because we realised the only solution was a platform designed from the ground up for operations teams everywhere. I’ve been taken aback by the feedback we’ve received from customers but we are only getting started on our journey. We’re delighted to have found a partner in OMERS Ventures who fully understands the scale and potential of the operations problem we are solving and the need to take a long-term perspective to solve it with us.”
Harry Briggs, Managing Partner at OMERS Ventures said, “Operations is such an integral part of a company’s day-to-day success as a business that it is bewildering that before Next Matter we hadn’t seen a purpose-built end-to-end cloud solution. We can see the proof of the product’s value in the rapid growth it has seen in the last 12 months and that growth is testament to the experience, dedication and drive of Jan and his team. We can’t wait to see where Next Matter goes next as they look to rapidly expand the business in the US and other territories.”
